Luck, Not Heart, Will Determine Huskies' Fate
A basketball is 9.39 inches across. A basketball hoop is 18 inches across. A perfectly placed shot has very little air on either side of it as it swishes through the rim. Four inches in any direction, and it's a brick. More than a little luck is involved.
The Seattle media would do well to keep this in mind. For whenever the UW Husky men have lost this year, our city's imaginative sportswriters have ascribed it not to the inherent vagaries of marksmanship, but to a team-wide personality defect. To wit:
12/1--Gonzaga 99, UW 87. "The Huskies…missed something important: Heart."
--Art Thiel in the P-I.
2/13--OSU 90, UW 73 "They played with less intensity…and poorer focus."
--John Levesque in the P-I.
3/5--Stanford 77, UW 67 "The Huskies…don't know how to handle success."
--Blaine Newnham in the Times.
Actually, it's Seattle sportswriters than don't know how to handle success. The Huskies are a great team, but they lack a consistent inside scoring threat, and so they are reliant on the outside shot. If they have a bad shooting night they will lose.
It happens, and it doesn't have to do with heart. Take the Sonics, who, on Tuesday night, scored 33 points in the first quarter and a franchise-record low 6 in the third. They didn't lose their heart in the locker room at halftime, they lost their shot.
This is the first Washington team since the 1950s with a legitimate shot at winning a national championship. If their shots drop, it could happen. If they don't, they could lose in the first round. It's the nature of a perimeter-shooting team. The key to enjoying this historic team's run is to accept that and see how far they can ride their shooting. It could (knock on wood) take them very far.
The Dawgs warm-up for the NCAA Tournament with the Pac-10 tournament, which begins tonight in Los Angeles. The Huskies play Arizona State at 6:15. The game will be televised on Fox Sports Net.
