I didn’t expect the Huskies to win last night at Gonzaga. I also didn’t expect them to be down 27-6 nine minutes into the game, which went about as poorly as possible save for everyone coming out of it healthy.

If last night was your first time watching UW play this year — true for almost anyone without the Pac-12 Network — I think it offered something of a misleading impression for a few reasons.

– At Gonzaga might be the hardest game on the schedule
After their win, the Zags are now up to No. 13 in the KenPom.com rankings, just ahead of the top Pac-12 team (UCLA, now 14th). Add in the crazed bandbox that is the Kennel and playing at Gonzaga is a tough matchup for any team, let alone one starting a pair of freshmen playing just their second true road game.

Earlier this year, Gonzaga hosted a pretty good San Diego State team and beat the Aztecs 69-48 in a game that was no closer than this one. We’ll see if Akron, the other top-100 team the Zags host, can do any better on Saturday night.

– The Huskies couldn’t make anything around the rim
The signature sequence of this game to me came just under four minutes in. Washington came up with a pair of offensive rebounds and missed twice from point-blank range before Przemek Karnowski finally cleared the defensive glass. He began a fast break that resulted in Jordan Mathews burying a 3 at the other end. The phrase “five-point swing” is one of my pet peeves because it implies the other team would automatically go scoreless, but in this case had the Huskies merely made a layup they could have forced Gonzaga into the half-court offense in addition to scoring two points. Let’s call it a 3.8-point swing, one of many that helped turn the game into a rout.

According to Hoop-Math.com, UW shot 14-of-35 (40 percent) at the rim. These are the kinds of looks teams want to generate on offense, and the Huskies have made them at a 58.7 percent clip this season. It would be overly simplistic to say UW should have made six or seven more shots because many of those attempts came on second chances that wouldn’t have existed had the first shot gone down, but suffice it to say the process was better than the results for the Huskies’ offense.

– Gonzaga made everything from the perimeter
Intriguingly, virtually the same thing happened to San Diego State on offense in Spokane. The Aztecs shot 8-of-19 (42.1 percent) at the rim. The only reason the final score wasn’t more lopsided than 21 points was the Zags’ 8-of-24 3-point shooting. UW got no such break, as Gonzaga made half its 16 3-point attempts.

The Huskies are now allowing 38.7 percent 3-point shooting, good for 284th in the country. And while it’s tempting to attribute that to missed assignments like the ones that left Matthews open, the evidence is overwhelming that teams have little to no control over what their opponents shoot from 3-point range over a full season, let alone a handful of games. Washington’s 3-point defense will inevitably regress to the mean, which will be interpreted as the defense improving.

If the Zags go 6-of-16 on 3s and the Huskies make a few more shots around the basket, this game looks more like the 15-point loss KenPom predicted than the calamity that actually unfolded. And that helps explain why this game didn’t actually do much to change KenPom’s outlook for the season going forward. Washington dropped just four spots in the rankings and is still projected to go 7-11 in conference play.

Look, let’s be clear: this is not a good Huskies team. It’s going to take some kind of a miracle — either an in-season turnaround on the magnitude of Lorenzo Romar‘s first NCAA tournament team in 2003-04 or running the table at the Pac-12 Tournament — for the Huskies to reach March Madness. But UW also isn’t nearly as bad as last night looked and felt.

It’s been a frustrating start for the Washington Husky men’s basketball team, which is 4-3 entering tonight’s game in Spokane against Gonzaga, the first matchup between the two teams in the state of Washington in nearly a decade. (They resumed their series a year ahead of time in the 2015 Battle 4 Atlantis.)

In the context of the UW roster, and specifically its youth, I don’t think much about how the Huskies started should be surprising.

The eight-player rotation on which Lorenzo Romar has settled includes three freshmen, four sophomores and senior Malik Dime, a JC transfer with just one year of Division I experience.

Overall, KenPom.com calculates the Huskies as having 0.98 years of weighted experience — that is, the average minute is played by a player with about one year of D-I experience — which ranks 341st of the 351 D-I programs. Looking around the six biggest conferences, similar teams haven’t (with one notable exception) been any more successful than UW.

Here’s how the five other major-conference teams with less than a year of weighted experience have started.

• Tennessee is 4-3 and ranks 86th in the KenPom rankings
• Iowa is 4-5 and ranks 87th, having lost at home to No. 156 Nebraska Omaha
• Missouri is 5-3 and ranked 145th, having lost at home to No. 197 North Carolina Central
• Kentucky is 7-1 and ranked 5th
• St. John’s is 4-5 and lost five consecutive games (including No. 328 Delaware State at home) at one point, dropping to No. 114
• Mississippi State is 6-2 but ranks just 119th, having beaten no team ranked in the top 100

Aside from John Calipari, who has established an NBA pipeline populated by premier one-and-done talent (including four of last year’s McDonald’s All-Americans), nobody else has found more success with as little experience as the Huskies, who currently rank 90th via KenPom.

Now, I know what you’re saying: None of those teams have one of the nation’s top freshmen either. Of course, there’s an easy example that one such star isn’t enough to guarantee competitiveness: last year’s LSU team, which was 4-3 and ranked 99th by KenPom at the same point of the season and ended up missing the NCAA tournament despite the presence of No. 1 overall pick Ben Simmons. (At 1.1 weighted years, the Tigers had a little more experience than UW.)

Top prospects like Simmons and Washington’s Markelle Fultz, who’s lived up to every bit of the hype so far, are fun to watch. But unless you have them in bunches, they don’t tend to translate into team success without the kind of experienced teammates the Huskies lack.