Time for the grind

PULLMAN – There are only two things you really need to know about the Pac-10 Conference’s basketball season – and they are interrelated.

The first has to do with the quality of the conference. Ask one of the coaches about it and the praise flows like the Spokane River in April.

“It’s Pac-10 play. It’s a rough environment,” said Oregon coach Ernie Kent. “You need to step up, and hopefully we’ll do that.”

“It will be a very, very tough January, February and March in the Pac-10,” UCLA coach Ben Howland said.

“The one thing about conference play is, it’s a gantlet,” said Arizona State’s Herb Sendek. “It’s 18, plus one, at least, 19 straight games against really good teams. So it’s unforgiving. There’s no easy way to get well.

“You’ve got to earn everything you get in this league. It’s an incredible league.”

“The Pac-10 is as good as advertised, maybe better,” Cal coach Ben Braun said. “I’ve watched every team in the league and I’ve been impressed.”

“Nothing truly prepares you for league play,” WSU coach Tony Bennett said. “I could talk forever about how good the conference is. … One through 10, the league is excellent.”

So we know the Pac-10, which opens play tonight with four games, is tough.

It’s more-than-half-the-conference’s-teams-ranked-in-the-Top-25-at-some-point tough. It’s 94-25-in-nonconference-games tough.

But the bigger question is, how did the Pac-10 get this good? To answer that is to delve into the second lesson you need to remember.

The Pac-10 has become a defensive-oriented conference.

You can blame the Bennetts, Tony and before him, dad Dick, along with others such as Howland, Sendek and USC’s Tim Floyd, for bringing a tough, get-in-your-face attitude to what once was a finesse conference.

“Think of the coaches who came in this league since my father came in,” said Bennett, whose team doesn’t begin conference until Saturday night at Washington. “Defensively, this league has changed. So you’re seeing a shift in teams. … It’s changed over the past eight years or so.”

That transformation has helped the conference not only in the preseason, but the postseason as well.

“I think it is no coincidence why teams have done better in the NCAA tournament the last couple years, because teams are really paying attention to the halfcourt defensively,” Bennett said. “They are really getting after it. … It’s becoming a physical, grind-it-out game in stretches, and you have to play that way to be successful in this league. In any playoffs, you have to be able to play defense, to be able to play in the halfcourt. … It makes it hard because every game is a grinder.”

A grinder that begins to chew up the conference’s teams tonight.