WSU plays numbers game
PULLMAN – Getting over the half-court line can be difficult when the player holding the ball is triple-teamed. If he should pass it to a teammate, only to have that player triple-teamed as well, it gets tougher.
All this week, Washington State University has made life for itself just that difficult. Preparing for the fast, aggressive and at time overwhelming attack of Washington, WSU head coach Dick Bennett has had his team go 5-on-7 while working on its press break.
Failure (a turnover) means running lines for the offending offensive players.
The Cougars know they face a strenuous test at 4 p.m. today in the Huskies, who defeated WSU by 18 in Seattle four weeks ago. But in many ways, that drill and the game today represent just a sample of what the Cougars will face the rest of the season.
Only five games remain on the Cougars’ Pacific-10 Conference slate, and in a seventh-place tie at 5-8, they’ll likely need to play some of their best basketball down the stretch to secure a bid in the conference tournament. The two teams at the bottom of the regular-season standings are left at home watching the proceedings in Los Angeles, which will start March 10.
With the dwindling number of games left on the calendar, the 10-12 Cougars are sensing an increasing amount of pressure.
“I feel like we know what we’d like to do, maybe even a little more than when we were over there the last time,” Bennett said. “The kids know. They were in it last year, and they really want to get in it again. But the more we tend to talk about it, the more they reflect back, ‘Oh, gosh, we should have had one of those two – maybe both – UCLA games. We should have had the Oregon game here. We might have had the Oregon game there.’ And that just frustrates you.”
Five teams from fifth to ninth places, including WSU, are separated by just two games. So in theory, the Pac-10 tournament could look differently come March than it would if the season ended today.
The Cougars face one of the more difficult tests of any in the five-team scrum for position. After today’s game against Washington – one made all the more challenging as the 20-4 Huskies have had to stew for a week after a rare blowout loss at Oregon State – WSU plays first-place Arizona and then two of the last three on the road.
“It’s going to be an uphill battle, just because we’re playing probably the upper half of the conference,” WSU senior guard Thomas Kelati said. “We’ve got two ranked teams. Arizona State is tough, and then Cal and Stanford at their place. It’s definitely going to be tough, but we’ve proven that we can play with all of those teams.”
A few weeks ago, Bennett had said that eight wins would probably be needed to get into the conference tournament. Now, however, it appears that seven may be enough. But while even two wins could be difficult given the Cougars’ schedule, Bennett has instructed his team to be ready for every game.
Lest the Cougars forget, Bennett is more than happy to remind them that they’ve already shown they can beat a top team, as they did in defeated conference-leading Arizona on the road in January.
“I’m trying to prepare them in such a way, and actually I think we started talking about it before the Oregon game, about trying to play as well as we can, as hard as we can each game, without regard for who we’re playing,” Bennett said. “Because we don”t know when your chance comes. It could come when you don’t expect it, and you have to be there. It’s like knocking on a door – you don’t know when it’s going to be answered.”
Notes
The Cougars had an aggressive week of practices, punctuated on Friday by two incidents. Early in the session, guard Isaiah Simmons and forward Daven Harmeling collided, and Simmons came away with a skull fracture that will end his season. The senior was reinstated just a week ago after missing seven games because of an academic suspension. Now, however, Simmons’ WSU career has come to an early end for certain. Later, forwards Chris Schlatter and Chris Henry got into an altercation and shared less-than-kind words after some rough play in the low post.