There’s good news as the University of Washington Huskies prepare to take on crosstown rival Seattle University in their annual matchup tonight as the visitors at KeyArena. The game against Seattle U marks the first of four games against sub-200 competition that is far and away the easiest stretch of the Huskies’ schedule. Per Ken Pomeroy’s rankings, all four teams rate substantially worse than the weakest foe Washington has played to date (No. 158 Nevada).

The bad news is the damage has already been done. Saturday’s loss to the Wolfpack dropped the Huskies to 4-4, which already ties the most non-conference losses in the months of November and December in Lorenzo Romar‘s decade at his alma mater–with a trip to Connecticut still looming before the start of Pac-12 play. Three of those four defeats have come at home, where Washington was previously virtually unbeatable against non-BCS foes. Between Romar’s first rebuilding season and last year’s upset by tournament-bound South Dakota State, the Huskies suffered just one home loss to a team outside the major conferences: Gonzaga, in 2004, when the Zags were a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament and hardly comparable.

The situation isn’t quite as dire as those statistics might suggest. Pomeroy still rates Washington as one of the top 100 schools in the country (No. 96) and other rankings are more charitable. Sports-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System puts the Huskies 81st, while Jeff Sagarin’s method settles on 87th. Still, Washington is 99th in RPI, and an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament would already be difficult. The Huskies have work to do just to get back to the NIT.

During this rebuilding year, three factors in particular have hurt Washington. Let’s tackle them in ascending order.

1. Lack of a Go-To Scorer

The Huskies have plenty of valuable pieces on the roster. They just don’t quite fit together because they are supposed to complement a featured scorer–Terrence Ross–who is already in the NBA. When Ross committed to Washington while his teammate at Jefferson High School, Terrence Jones, de-committed, the theory went that Ross would ultimately be more valuable because he would stay around while Jones was headed to the league after a year. Instead, both players left after their sophomore seasons and Ross was drafted higher (No. 8) than Jones (No. 18).

Ross developed so quickly that it wasn’t until the Huskies’ NIT run that it became clear his stock was so high he had to declare for the draft. With Ross, Washington would have ideal complementary pieces in outside shooters C.J. Wilcox and Scott Suggs with rebounders and defenders Aziz N’Diaye and Desmond Simmons and a senior point guard (Abdul Gaddy) running the show.

Instead, Wilcox has been asked to serve as the Huskies’ featured scorer with impressive but mixed results. He ranks second in the Pac-12 in scoring at 19.9 points per game without any loss of efficiency. Looking at Wilcox’s overall numbers, however, masks the inconsistency that is inevitable given his perimeter-oriented game. While Wilcox averages similar points per game in wins and losses, he takes more shots in losses. His True Shooting Percentage has been an incredible .650 in wins and a more average .556 in losses.

2. Perimeter Defense

Of course, Washington’s offense hasn’t really been the issue. The Huskies rank 60th in adjusted offensive efficiency–precisely the same as last year. The true culprit is the defensive end of the floor, where Washington ranks 175th, far and away the worst mark of the Romar era–including his first season. So it’s hard to pin this on the system. Part of the issue is nothing more than luck; opponents have made 37.3 percent of their threes against the Huskies this season, and Pomeroy’s research has shown that opponent three-point shooting is essentially nothing more than statistical noise over the course of a full year, let alone eight games.

Other issues figure to be more lasting. Washington isn’t forcing turnovers–they’re doing so at the worst rate in the Romar era–and has been one of the nation’s worst teams on the defensive glass (among major-conference teams, only UConn has been weaker). While that points a finger at the rebounding contributions from perimeter players, everything is connected to a larger issue. The Huskies keep allowing dribble penetration out of isolation plays and pick-and-rolls, which gets the team into scramble mode–running out wildly at open shooters, leading to either an extra pass for a score or a second chance.

Gaddy’s lateral quickness, lost when he tore his ACL as a sophomore, isn’t coming back. Nor is N’Diaye going to get any more mobile against the pick-and-roll. The only solution here may be a heavy dose of zone defense that keeps N’Diaye anchored in the paint and perimeter players in front of their men.

The other personnel issue that has hurt Washington defensively remains the team’s single biggest issue:

3. Depth

The Huskies have played three games this season with a full perimeter rotation: a 22-point home win over a decent Loyola (Md.) team, a neutral-site win in overtime over a Big East team (Seton Hall) and an 11-point neutral-site loss to one of the nation’s top 10 teams (Ohio State). Rated strictly based on those three games, the Huskies would be a top-15 team by Sagarin’s ratings. Let that sink in.

That should give a sense of how bad the team has been in the other five games. Washington’s rating in them would place 211th, right between NC Asheville and James Madison. According to Sagarin, within this tiny sample size, the Huskies are more than 18 points worse when one of their perimeter players (either Suggs or Andrew Andrews) has been injured. The impact on their Offensive Rating, per Pomeroy, is 15.6 points per 100 possessions.

The team’s fourth guard–sophomore Hikeem Stewart–hasn’t shown he belongs on the court. Finding his usage rate this season (7.5 percent of the team’s plays and just 4.2 percent of shots, via Kenpom.com) requires a microscope, and Stewart is undersized defensively. (He does deserve huge credit for coming up with the deflection that helped UW beat Cal State Fullerton last week.) Romar has also tried walk-on Quinn Sterling, who has provided energy but also looks overmatched by the speed of the D-I game.

StatSheet.com has Stewart with a -24 plus-minus this season, including a costly -13 stint in the loss to Albany. Sterling is a -3, and in the rest of the Nevada game the Huskies played the Wolfpack even. In the five games where Washington has been short-handed, they are -22 with either Stewart or Sterling on the floor and +7 otherwise. Of course, the impact of depth goes beyond just expanding the rotation. The remaining perimeter players, especially Gaddy and Wilcox, have been forced to play heavy minutes thus far, leaving them less energetic on defense.

Returning to the good news/bad news breakdown from the lede, there are two ways to view this information. When and if Andrews comes back from a sprained ankle and the Huskies get back to full strength for the first time all season (Shawn Kemp, Jr. also missed the first seven games before returning, though his absence was less costly), there’s reason to believe the team might be decent if not good. However, this issue will not go away all season. Washington will always be one misstep away from trouble on the perimeter, and Romar can’t trade an extra big man to add perimeter depth. So whether the rest of this season will match the start will depend largely on injury luck.

When the Washington Huskies began their NIT run a week ago, I was admittedly about as ambivalent as the rest of the fan base. As long as the Huskies played on and tickets remained (very) available, however, I planned to be at Hec Edmundson Pavilion. The crowd of a few thousand that turned out last Tuesday was angry, in nearly equal measure with the referees, Texas Arlington and the Washington team itself.

Seven days later, the scene could not possibly have been more different as the Huskies met the Oregon Ducks with a trip to Madison Square Garden for the NIT’s version of the final four on the line. Matching up the two bitter rivals added an extra element to the NIT, especially in the wake of a 25-point loss in Eugene the last time the teams squared off. UW announced the official attendance at 9,140, but I didn’t see any open seats–certainly not in the bleachers, where so many people crowded into so little space that the crowd became a sweaty, frenzied mass of humanity.

From the opening tip, the crowd was on edge, booing a series of calls that put Aziz N’Diaye and Terrence Ross in early foul trouble as well as the Oregon cheer squad’s incongruous appearances at center court during timeouts. We chanted “Go! Huskies!” more often than I can ever remember at a basketball game and screamed our lungs out for Ross’ three-pointers and Tony Wroten‘s trips to the free throw line.

For one night, at least, the fact that this was the three-letter tournament and not its more prestigious four-letter counterpart did not matter. To steal Jerry Izenberg‘s famous line about the Thrilla in Manila, the Huskies and the Ducks weren’t playing for the NIT championship, they were playing for the championship of each other.

These two teams deserved another meeting because the first two matchups between them, both won by the home team in lopsided fashion, failed to do justice to how evenly matched they were. This one featured more twists and turns, following a similar script to many Washington victories this season: halftime deficit, taking control in the second half, then hanging on down the stretch, often by the narrowest of margins.

Unlike its predecessors, this Husky team was rarely able to dominate its opposition. Playing a series of close games is a tough way to make a living, and it cost Washington dearly during the Pac-12 Tournament against Oregon State. If I’ve come to realize–and appreciate–one thing about the NIT, it’s that in its modern incarnation this tournament is designed to reward exactly these kinds of successful but flawed teams. The NIT is a little like the Island of Misfit Toys. Every team has some shortcoming that kept it out of the NCAA tournament. Still, put two evenly matched teams like that together, especially if their flaws happen to match up correctly, and it can produce wildly entertaining games like Tuesday night’s.

No matter what happens next week at Madison Square Garden, this Husky team will have a special place in my heart. Certainly, it’s been frustrating at times, but I think it’s important to put the ups and downs in context. A decade ago, we’d have killed to be in the discussion for the NCAA tournament. Exactly 10 years ago, Washington met Oregon in the postseason. That game was the opener of the newly reinstated Pac-10 Tournament, with the Ducks as the No. 1 seed and the Huskies No. 8–feeling happy just to have made it to Los Angeles back when the conference’s last two teams didn’t even earn an invitation to the tournament.

This UW season has been challenging, but it’s that very process that has made the real triumphs–the second solo conference regular-season championship in the past 59 years, plus the NIT run–so rewarding to anyone who has stuck the process out. I see that in Lorenzo Romar‘s reaction. During Romar’s decade in Seattle, I don’t remember him ever getting as fired up as over the course of this tournament. Against Texas Arlington, Romar seemed to be trying to convince his players to move past their disappointment and get serious about the NIT. By Tuesday night, that was no longer necessary, but Romar was still an animated presence on the sidelines. When it was over, he took the microphone for the second consecutive game to thank the fans for their support and sing with an admittedly hoarse voice a few bars of New York, New York.

Nobody can tell Romar the NIT is meaningless. And, now, you can’t tell me that either.

After Friday’s Washington win over Northwestern, I noted on Twitter that the Huskies’ best performance of the season had come in the NIT. I wanted to see if that could be justified statistically. My method, same as for looking at UW’s football performance on a game-by-game basis, was to adjust Sagarin predictor rating for location and then subtract that from the actual outcome. You could do something similar with Ken Pomeroy‘s ratings, but I’m not sure how he adjusts for location.

So, for example, the Huskies should be expected to beat the Wildcats by 4.8 points at home, based on national home-court advantage figures. (In practice, Washington shows a slightly larger home/road split.) Instead, the margin of victory was 21. Take the former from the latter and the Huskies played 16.2 points better than normal on Friday night, which was in fact their best performance of the season.

If we graph Washington’s game-by-game performance, it looks like this:

There’s not really a trend here. The Huskies’ best games were distributed fairly randomly throughout the season, as were their poor performances. So I’m not sure we learned much here except that Washington really did find its best gear on Friday.

Complete Ratings

Game                     Outcome    Rating
------------------------------------------
vs. Georgia St.         W, 91-74     11.7
vs. Florida Atlantic    W, 77-71     -8.6
vs. Portland            W, 93-63      9.8
at Saint Louis          L, 77-64     -4.3
vs. Houston Baptist     W, 88-65     -3.4
at Nevada               L, 76-73     -4.1
Marquette (N)           L, 79-77      4.1
Duke (N)                L, 86-80      0.2
vs. UC Santa Barbara    W, 87-80     -1.5
vs. South Dakota St.    L, 92-73    -23.8
vs. CS Northridge       W, 74-51     -0.9
vs. Oregon St.          W, 95-80      9.5
vs. Oregon              W, 76-60     11.5
at Colorado             L, 87-69    -16.8
at Utah                 W, 57-53    -12.2
vs. Seattle             W, 91-83     -9.0
vs. Washington St.      W, 75-65      1.4
vs. California          L, 69-66     -4.1
vs. Stanford            W, 76-63      9.8
at Arizona St.          W, 60-54     -3.2
at Arizona              W, 69-67      4.9
vs. UCLA                W, 71-69     -2.1
vs. USC                 W, 69-41     12.2
at Oregon               L, 82-57    -22.5
at Oregon St.           W, 75-72      4.6
vs. Arizona St.         W, 77-69     -8.3
vs. Arizona             W, 79-70      4.8
at Washington St.       W, 59-55      2.5
at USC                  W, 80-58     13.3
at UCLA                 L, 75-69     -3.0
Oregon St. (N)          L, 86-84     -3.9
vs. Texas Arlington     W, 82-72      1.7
vs. Northwestern        W, 76-55     16.2

There is a persistent criticism of the Washington Huskies’ basketball program and Lorenzo Romar that the Huskies win games largely on the strength of their recruiting as opposed to coaching. I’ve addressed this in general before, but I want to discuss a complaint specific to this season: How could Washington not be better with two first-round picks?

(Actually, some people have said two lottery picks, but that’s a stretch. DraftExpress has Terrence Ross No. 18 and Tony Wroten No. 28 at the moment. If they both end up going in the lottery, it will be a bit of a surprise.)

Ross and Wroten are both terrific players, among the 10 best in the conference and therefore deserving of All-Pac-12 honors and Player of the Year consideration. Unfortunately, this isn’t NBA Jam, and the Huskies can’t play their opponents two-on-two. After Ross (fifth) and Wroten (seventh), the next-best Washington player in terms of in-conference WARP was C.J. Wilcox (25th). From there you have to go Aziz N’Diaye (38th) and Darnell Gant (54th). All were effective, but not overwhelmingly so. None of the three were highly touted as recruits. According to the consensus ranking at RSCIhoops.com, Gant was the nation’s 100th-best recruit. N’Diaye and Wilcox were unranked.

There’s this myth out there that the Huskies are loaded with elite recruits that I just can’t quite understand. In fact, only one other Husky besides Ross and Wroten was a big-time recruit: point guard Abdul Gaddy, ranked 11th, ahead of both Wroten (18th) and Ross (33rd). As it turned out, Gaddy’s talent was overstated, and he wasn’t quite the same athlete this season after tearing his ACL last January. No other player in the Washington rotation was ranked in the top 100 coming out of high school.

For comparison purposes, I looked at seven-man rotations for the rest of the conference’s top six teams. Here’s how their lineups rated:

Arizona
14 Turner
22 N. Johnson
56 Hill
59 Chol
NR Fogg, Lavender, Perry

California
71 Crabbe
NR Cobbs, Gutierrez, Kamp, Kravish, Smith, Thurman

Colorado
NR Booker, Brown, Dinwiddie, Dufault, Harris-Tunks, Roberson, Tomlinson

Oregon
41 Woods
NR Ashaolu, Emory, Joseph, Lloyd, Sim, Singler

UCLA
18 Smith
37 T. Wear
38 D. Wear
39 Lamb
42 Anderson
53 Powell
NR Jones

There are a few takeaways here. One is that recruiting rankings are not very accurate. You too can prevent Recruiting Overhype by pointing out that the conference’s most valuable player by WARP, Andre Roberson, was not a top-100 recruit. (Or my classic choice, Kyryl Natyazhko being rated higher than Derrick Williams as part of Arizona’s 2009 recruiting haul.)

Another is that the Huskies’ talent is not out of line with the rest of the conference’s power teams. Arizona has two top-25 freshmen plus another pair of top-60 recruits. It’s just that nobody talks about Josiah Turner as a lottery pick or better than Wroten anymore. UCLA can’t quite match UW’s top-end talent, but despite the number of defections, Ben Howland had nearly a full rotation of top-55 recruits at his disposal. From a pure talent standpoint, both of those teams should have been as good as the Huskies.

Of course, there are more factors at play here. If you average the experience of the seven-man rotations, UW (1.3 years), UCLA (1.4) and Arizona (1.6) were also the youngest of the conference contenders. By contrast, Oregon (2.3) and California (1.9) put more experienced teams on the floor. Colorado (1.6) had three senior starters, but Tad Boyle deserves tremendous credit for winning the conference tournament with two freshmen and a sophomore among his top-six players, none of them top-100 recruits.

The other aspect nobody talks about is depth. The reason I used seven players was because none of the Pac-12’s most talented teams was capable of going much further than that. Due to transfers, injuries and youth, Arizona, California and UCLA all went mostly with seven-man rotations. Romar used eight, but never was able to find a consistent option for that eighth spot among his freshmen big men. Against Oregon State in particular, the Huskies’ youth in the frontcourt behind N’Diaye proved costly.

Those players count too. I know they’re not as fun to discuss as the stars, but when you’re evaluating a team’s talent level, you have to include the whole team.

Way back in October, the consensus among the media covering the Washington Huskies was that, while he might not be anywhere near the team’s best player, Aziz N’Diaye was the most important to the Huskies’ chances. N’Diaye’s combination of size and experience was unique on a roster that lacked any other returning players bigger than 6-8. I called N’Diaye “invaluable” in College Basketball Prospectus 2011-12 and Lorenzo Romar reiterated when N’Diaye suffered a minor knee injury in December that what his 7-footer does can’t be replaced by anyone else on the roster.

Everything we’ve learned since then has only reconfirmed this notion. Romar has spent all season searching for a fourth big man in the rotation to complement N’Diaye, senior forward/center Darnell Gant and redshirt freshman forward Desmond Simmons. He’s sorted through Martin Breunig, Shawn Kemp, Jr. and football player Austin Seferian-Jenkins, never settling on any one. Breunig has been out of the rotation since early in the conference season, but Kemp and Seferian-Jenkins are still splitting minutes.

So it should come as no surprise that N’Diaye had the best plus-minus rating among Washington regulars this season. The Huskies have outscored opponents by 9.7 points per 40 minutes with N’Diaye on the floor (excepting the Utah game, because substitution data was inaccurate). Only Seferian-Jenkins (+10.8 in limited action) has a better mark. That puts N’Diaye ahead of All-Pac-10 First Team picks and Player of the Year candidates Terrence Ross (+7.9) and Tony Wroten (+5.1).

Basically, there’s ample evidence both quantitative and qualitative of N’Diaye’s importance, which makes it odd that his presence or absence is rarely discussed as an explanation for Washington’s success or failure.

Sliced another way, the numbers again back this up. When N’Diaye has played at least 25 minutes this season, the Huskies are 7-2 with both losses by a single possession. There have been 13 games this season, largely blowouts, where N’Diaye’s minutes have been limited for no particular reason. Washington is 9-4 in those games. The Huskies went 1-1 when N’Diaye sat out due to his knee injury, including their most embarrassing loss, a 19-point home defeat at the hands of South Dakota State.

That leaves seven games where N’Diaye was saddled by foul trouble, picking up either four or five fouls and playing fewer than 25 minutes as a result. Washington has won just four of those games. Last Saturday at UCLA, the Huskies actually played better without N’Diaye. In the other two losses (vs. Marquette at Madison Square Garden and Thursday’s Pac-12 Tournament loss to Oregon State), Washington outscored the opposition with N’Diaye on the floor and lost the lead when he was forced to the bench.

N’Diaye’s fouls were particularly problematic for the Huskies against the Beavers because Gant too was in foul trouble, picking up three fouls in the first half. The stretch before halftime where Washington was forced to play without either starting big man essentially cost the team the game.

During the 14 minutes Gant and N’Diaye played together on Thursday, the Huskies dominated, outscoring Oregon State 27-17. They were outscored 61-52 with one or the other on the floor, and 14-10 during the six minutes both starters were on the bench.

With the benefit of hindsight, the game turned against Washington when N’Diaye fouled out with 3:22 to play. Lorenzo Romar responded by going small, putting Ross at power forward and Gant at center. On paper, this configuration is the Huskies’ most talented, but in practice it has been relatively ineffective, playing opponents even. The problem is that Washington simply doesn’t have enough size to defend with the 6-6 Ross at the four, allowing 84.9 points per 40 minutes. Indeed, the Huskies’ small unit allowed the Beavers to either score or get to the free throw line on every possession down the stretch. Washington could not score enough to keep Oregon State at bay.

The basketball court is not a science lab, so there is no possibility of re-running Thursday’s game with N’Diaye avoiding foul trouble. In a game as close as that was, however, everything we know suggests N’Diaye’s absence in the final minutes may have made the difference in the game and the Huskies’ season.