Arizona’s sophomore star forward Marcus Williams, who suffered an ankle sprain in the weekend loss to North Carolina, is to be back at practice Tuesday and to be ready to play Thursday against Washington State and Saturday against the Huskies, according to the Tucson Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star.
Huge road trip coming up against Arizona State on Thursday and Arizona on Saturday. I think it’s one where anything can happen:
Sweep: Possible season-turning momentum starts to build heading into three-game homestand.
Split: Hopes kept alive, but margin for error grows smaller with any loss.
Swept: Goodbye NCAA.
And, of course, you can’t sweep without winning the first one. And, of course, none of UW’s dreams — maybe not even the NIT — survive unless the Huskies learn how to win on the road. This is their best chance. They’ve got to put the “win-on-the-road”
…Spencer Hawes says he is healthy again, recovered from his stomach illness and his ankle sprain.
However, he played only 18 minutes today in UW’s victory over Oregon State, and coach Lorenzo Romar said he hadn’t decided on moving Hawes back into the starting lineup next Thursday when UW visits Arizona State.
So. Hmm.
Meanwhile, here’s a Romar quote on current starting center Artem Wallace: “Artem is one of those guys when you look you say OK, he doesn’t shoot free throws very well, he rarely takes an outside shot, we don’t see him score that much
…The Huskies settled this one early in the second half, and there was no doubt though the final 15 minutes.
I thought the most interesting thing was the 22 minutes of playing time for Artem Wallace, 18 minutes for Spencer Hawes. Romar seems to love Wallace’s effort, and by implication he seems to want more of that from Hawes. Hawes seems to be taking the message well, but I’ll try to post a few quotes on that in the next few hours.
Meanwhile, my game notes:
Star of the game: Washington forward Jon Brockman led all scorers
…Romar might want to keep a transcript of whatever he said at halftime, because a different UW team came out in the second half, needing only about seven minutes to work the lead up to 20 points.
Hawes, by the way, is playing more this half and looking mighty healthy…
Really ugly first half, but the Huskies struggled ahead at the end.
They are being led by their sophomores: Justin Dentmon, 14 points; Jon Brockman, 12 points.
Kyle Jeffers (12) and Josh Tarver (11) are leading the way for the Beavers.
Both teams have had trouble working the ball around: UW has 11 turnovers — as many in a half as they had Thursday against Oregon. But OSU has seven turnovers. And UW actually has more points off turnovers: 13-11.
The Dawgs are dominating the boards, as expected: 17-9.
Both teams are shooting over
…One week from today, the Huskies will be at Arizona in a game that had been expected to be one of the most difficult on the schedule.
However, the Wildcats have been slumping lately and that was driven home again today as they were mauled by North Carolina, 92-64 — the worst loss of the Lute Olson era.
This was Arizona’s fifth loss in its last seven games. More significantly, Marcus Williams apparently left the game with a scary looking injury.
Here is the Arizona Star story, which deals more with the injury.
We’ll have an interview with Justin Dentmon in the newspaper tomorrow. However, there was one interesting part I wanted to share here.
Even as early as last season, Dentmon had made no secret of his hopes of eventually playing in the NBA, or even of his willingness to leave college early to do it.
Today, after some of the struggles of his sophomore season, he indicated that he still hopes to play in the NBA, but he seemed to commit to returning for his junior year and even seemed to admit that he’d probably benefit from a fourth
…