Washington had just lost a Jan. 23 game to Southern California by 26 points to drop to 3-5 in the Pac-10, making the Huskies’ No. 14 preseason ranking seem laughable.
So that’s what the Huskies players did. They laughed.
“It was the weirdest thing,” said Quincy Pondexter, who went 1-for-10 for a season-low two points in that disaster against the Trojans.
“The coaches had given their talk and had left, and we were alone in the locker room, and we just started giggling. It couldn’t get any worse, and we were just thinking, ‘What in the world are we doing?’”
The loss dropped the Huskies to 0-6 in games away from home, and there was no indication things would change.
But after two upsets, including Saturday’s 84-62 lashing of No. 3 New Mexico in an NCAA tournament second-round game at HP Pavilion, it’s clear that things have changed.
The Huskies entered the tournament as a No. 11 seed.
From Pondexter’s perspective, the season is reminiscent of Washington’s 2004 season — one that started much like this one, but, in the end, impressed Pondexter, then a sophomore in Fresno, Calif.
Pondexter remembered being impressed by that Huskies’ team, which started the Pac-10 season 0-5, then won 14 of their next 16 games, beating undefeated No. 1 Stanford along the way and earning an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament.
Pondexter had followed the Huskies’ late-season run that year, and it was one of the reasons he chose to go to Washington.
The season turned around almost overnight for that Washington team. And it happened again in 2010 —at almost the same stage of the season, and again for no apparent reason.
“We had had all kinds of problems figuring out the right combinations on the floor,” Washington coach Lorenzo Romar said.
There was no seminal moment. No great pep talk or dramatic lineup change. Players simply began to slip comfortably into roles that fit their strengths, and the pieces began to fit together.
The Huskies that battered New Mexico on Saturday were the same team that lost to USC back in January in name only.
Romar claims to have noticed the beginning of change in the loss to UCLA that came two days before the USC game. The Bruins won with a shot at the buzzer by a former walk-on, Mustafa Abdul-Hamid.
The loss should have been crushing psychologically, and it lingered long enough to result in the lopsided loss to USC two days later.
But Romar saw the players starting to share the ball against UCLA.
He saw the defensive energy that had been absent on the road, and the Huskies are nothing if they are not applying defensive pressure. He recognized combinations that worked and the style of play that worked.
It all started working, just as it had six years earlier.
And when it starts working with the Huskies’ stable of athletes and their up-tempo style, there is little that can stop them. No team in America is more prone to streaks — both positive and negative — than Washington.
Their style is an all-out attack. They can be mown down at times, making the Huskies look helpless and disorganized. But when they start breaking through, they are impossible to stop. Reinforcements just keep coming in, and the domination continues.
The Huskies are running over everything in their path now, and when they play fast and loose, they are not only successful but seem to enjoy the ride.
They don’t just block shot. They wind up like they are delivering a high-and-tight fastball and slap it into the crowd. Every turnover they force or rebound they grab is quickly run down the opponent’s throat.
A New Mexico team that had lost only once since Jan. 9 was gasping for air, while the Huskies were bringing in more players off the bench who could run, jump, defend and control the ball — all while the Lobos were trying to catch their breath.
“They’re so much deeper than we are,” Lobos coach Steve Alford said.
New Mexico was overrun by the Huskies’ attack, which pushed the lead to 23 points less than nine minutes into the second half. But while most teams will step back at that point, run some clock, protect a lead, the Huskies stepped up the pace further.
Shots were going up seconds after getting possession. Three-pointers were being launched with impunity. New Mexico’s shots were being swatted away.
The Huskies have it going now, and Romar was not about to break the momentum.
And they did it all without the mistakes that typically accompany such break-neck pace. In the end, Washington committed just five turnovers.
“If we turn the ball over five times at the pace we play, it tells me we’re really focused, and that’s at the defensive end too,” Romar said.
The Huskies are a runaway train at the moment, and Romar has no intention of setting up a road block.
Pondexter scored 18 points Saturday and has scored 19, 18, 18 and 18 points in the Huskies’ past four games — a far cry from the Pondexter of mid-January, a player who would score 30 points one game and two the next.
Justin Holiday has turned into the defensive stopper and was the main reason Mountain West Player of the Year Darington Hobson was limited to 11 points while committing four turnovers.
Matthew Bryan-Amaning, who was barely noticeable early in the season, has become a major force inside, and his monster dunk late in Saturday’s game demonstrated his and the team’s mood.
When the Huskies are having fun, they are loose, and when they are loose they are a handful because they are just so darned athletic. The key, it seems, was finding the harmony that sometimes only comes through moments of failure.
“Both the 2004 team and this team had high opinions of themselves,” Romar said, “but they didn’t understand how you have to come together.”
The Huskies have been a surprise team twice this season. They stunned everyone, including themselves, by being so lousy early in the season and are surprising people now in the NCAA tournament by beating teams like Marquette and New Mexico.
“The best time to peak is at the end of the season,” Pondexter said. “We scared people for a while, and we almost started to too late.”
Pondexter can laugh about that now.
