Four years ago brought forth a score

Not to presume heartbreak, but if the basketball weekend doesn’t quite achieve nirvana for the Washington State Cougars, coach Tony Bennett might want to recall yet again the counsel of his father and predecessor:

“Sometimes improvement just means the losses are harder.”

Dick Bennett said that four years ago this weekend, after his first Cougars team played UCLA in Spokane – a game notable in several respects, not the least being that the Bruins won 48-45 a year after Jason Kapono had scored 44 on the Cougs all by himself.

All those Roman candles and bottle rockets being launched these days to herald the reign of Pacific-10 Conference basketball?

Well, the punk was touched to the fuse that night.

Naturally, all 12,000 of you who were in attendance at the Spokane Arena have pasted the stubs from the 2,861 tickets sold into your scrapbooks by now.

Heh, heh, heh.

Since then, we’ve been waiting for this very weekend, though the timing is somewhat problematic in that the fourth-ranked Cougars must first deal with USC tonight and the preternatural O.J. Mayo. A stub of the Cougars’ toe would take a bit of the shine off Saturday’s matinee against the No. 5 Bruins, but not enough that it wouldn’t still be considered the most anticipated game of the college basketball schedule to date.

Well, maybe “anticipated” isn’t the right word.

“It’s a root canal without Novocaine,” said UCLA coach Ben Howland in about all the preview of the Wazzu game he would submit to, lest it be suggested he wasn’t devoting enough attention to the Bruins’ date with Washington tonight.

Now, there is lots of basketball to be played even after Saturday afternoon and exceptional teams up and down the Pac-10 to make every weekend entertaining. And, yes, the East Coast snobs can make their cases for the ACC and the Big East, but let’s be parochial for just a few minutes and call this the center of the college basketball universe. After all, Oregon State’s RPI jumped 45 spots this week just from losing two games inside the league.

So the Pac-10 is swimming in glitz, and we’ll take the occasion now to remind you that you read it here first – four years ago.

Sort of. The exact prediction back in ‘04 was that whatever Howland and Dick Bennett were cooking up in their kitchens, “just about everybody is going to get some of it on them.”

And they have.

That was, of course, their first year on the job, and if it can’t necessarily be solely attributed to their hirings, the complexion of the Pac-10 changed that year. At UW, Lorenzo Romar finally pulled the Huskies out of an extended funk. Mike Montgomery won 30 games and took his NBA plunge, which didn’t work out all that well for either party, though the Cardinal are pulling themselves out of it. And Howland’s arrival was certainly the funeral wreath for Henry Bibby’s stay at USC and the impetus to bring in Tim Floyd to fill the Trojans’ new building.

If none of those seems particularly momentous, consider that four years ago – and 100 years before that – the most hyped high school basketball player in America never finds his way to USC.

And consider this: Since 1984, Arizona has never finished out of the first division. Given the rapid evolution of the league, that’s a real possibility this year.

The best thing about that 2004 meeting of the Bruins and Cougars – and the rematch a month later when Wazzu won at Pauley Pavilion for the first time in its history – was that neither coach had yet had time to remake his roster, but both had managed to remake the method. UCLA under Steve Lavin had been the softest collection of “name” talent in recent memory; the Cougars under Paul Graham had been the worst defensive teams the Pac-10 had possibly produced.

But between them that January night in Spokane, the Bruins and Cougars managed one fast-break basket. Both programs now play half-court defense like they invented it, but they don’t get the chance unless they play transition defense first.

And don’t think the gospel hasn’t spread.

Five Pac-10 teams are holding opponents to an average field-goal percentage of less than 40 percent. Four others are less than 43. That simply hasn’t happened in at least 30 years. Four years ago, only Stanford kept teams less than 43 percent for the season.

“It’s why this league is so hard,” Howland said. “A team like Arizona State, the way they play defense, no way they’re finishing ninth.

“There’s no question it’s so much more physical now, and it’s the players. The Lopez twins at Stanford, (James) Harden (at ASU), (Cal’s Ryan) Anderson, (UW’s Jon) Brockman. I tell you who is very physical is the big kid at Washington State (Aron Baynes). He’s just a beast. It never ends.”

And the start we witnessed here, four years ago.