“Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” – Cyril Connolly

During Abdul Gaddy‘s first two seasons at the University of Washington, no televised game went by without the broadcast crew making mention of the fact that seemed like it was part of his full name: In 2009, when Gaddy was coming out of Tacoma’s Bellarmine Prep, he was rated the No. 2 point guard in the nation behind John Wall.

That note still appears in the media guide, but as it became clear Gaddy was no Wall, those mentions became less frequent. The lofty ranking and the comparison with an NBA-bound star no longer felt like a source of pride but instead a cruel taunt.

There was always a false equivalence at play when Wall was referenced just because the two happened to play the same position. Wall was rated the No. 1 overall prospect in the country and needed only to avoid crashing and burning at Kentucky to be taken with the top pick of the 2010 NBA Draft. Gaddy was actually rated 11th by RSCIHoops.com’s consensus, putting him directly behind washout Tiny Gallon.

Still, Gaddy was a major prospect and the subject of a conference-wide recruiting battle that saw him initially sign with Arizona. I don’t know what the scouts saw when they watched Gaddy play in high school. I saw one of his games, during the annual King Holiday Hoopfest tournament at Hec Edmundson Pavilion, and came away somewhat underwhelmed. Gaddy was the best player on the court, certainly, but not the kind of singular talent the recruiting services suggested. I chalked that up to a mid-level high school game failing to showcase the court vision that was Gaddy’s strength, but when he arrived on campus, Gaddy showed little more in terms of high-level athleticism.

Maybe things would have been different had Gaddy not torn the ACL in his left knee. After all, he was 17 for most of his freshman season, making him the youngest player in the nation and a baby compared to some prep school products. (Teammate Shawn Kemp, Jr., for one, was 20 throughout his entire freshman campaign.) Before the untimely injury, Gaddy’s sophomore campaign was off to a solid start. He was making 55 percent of his twos and 40 percent of his threes, and while those numbers were due to come down against stiffer competition in conference play, Gaddy has never approached those shooting marks again.

For now, let’s stipulate that the scouts were in fact wrong about Gaddy. Here’s the thing: Nobody criticizes them for making a mistake, in part because of the overwhelming recruiting groupthink that makes it difficult if not impossible to single out any individual because of a bad evaluation. (No one had Gaddy ranked higher than 10th or lower than 16th.) More importantly, they’re not the ones out there running the point on a nightly basis. So all the blame has gone to the player. Gaddy has become the symbol for all the frustration Washington fans feel about the past four years, the subject of abuse if not scorn from the people who are supposed to be his fans.

There are few things more important to evaluating players than setting fair expectations. That goes double for amateur athletes, who suffer on-court scrutiny beyond their paygrade. What Gaddy owed the program, and fans, is the same thing any player does — working hard, representing UW well and giving his best effort. Has any of that ever been in question?

Gaddy worked his way back from one of the most devastating injuries an athlete can suffer. To the extent he struggled for reasons within his control, it was precisely because he lost confidence — in no small part because of the relentless criticism. If the goal of fandom is to see your team be as successful as possible, criticizing a player with a fragile psyche is overwhelmingly counter-productive.

Let’s talk about Gaddy’s performance. Here are the career stats for two point guards during the Lorenzo Romar era. Can you tell which of them is Gaddy?

            G    AST    TO   A/TO   PPG   APG   RPG
---------------------------------------------------
Player A   121   515   314   1.64   9.2   4.3   2.8
Player B   114   440   242   1.82   7.6   3.9   2.4

Player B is Gaddy and Player A is Will Conroy, one of the most popular Huskies in program history. Conroy is the better player, to be sure — he ultimately reached the NBA because he was a superior scorer and much better defender whose intangibles remain legendary. But it’s important to keep in mind the differences between the two players’ careers. Conroy arrived on campus as a walk-on, an unheralded recruit during a period when the entire Washington basketball program was an afterthought. By the time both he and the team were good enough to generate any expectations, Conroy was surrounded by talent like former Garfield teammate Brandon Roy, Nate Robinson, Bobby Jones and Tre Simmons. They grew together into a Pac-10 power.

By contrast, Gaddy’s college career has been much more uneven. After his injury, he had to find a way to coexist with the mercurial Tony Wroten as a junior. The departure of Wroten and Terrence Ross for the NBA last summer has forced Gaddy into the uncomfortable position of being the Huskies’ primary creator on offense. It’s also given him no choice but to be a leader, a role which he’s slowly embraced over the second half of this season. In another scenario, the areas in which Gaddy is not Conroy’s equal may never have been nearly so important.

On Saturday, Gaddy will be one of three seniors honored for their service to the University of Washington. Depending on where the Huskies land for postseason play, it might be the last time he takes the court at Hec Ed. I hope we don’t hear anything about John Wall, but instead about how Gaddy ranks third in school history in assists — and still has a chance to surpass Chester Dorsey for second by the end of the season. I hope Gaddy gets an enormous ovation. And I hope he finds some matter of satisfaction at the end of a career that should not be judged by his recruiting ranking.

One of my least favorite basketball cliches is that you only need to watch the last few minutes of a game. Even games that are close in nature are often decided long before the finish, and such was the case in Sunday’s Washington Huskies loss at USC. Though the Huskies weren’t completely out of the game until they were unable to get stops down the stretch, they lost the game by falling behind 20-8 before the first TV timeout.

The slow start continued a disturbing trend from this year’s Washington team. In their other two worst Pac-12 losses, home against Utah and at Oregon State, they came out flat. The Utes opened the game with a 12-2 run and the Beavers led 13-3 early en route to both winning their first conference game of the season.

Overall, the Huskies haven’t played poorly early in games. KenPom.com conveniently breaks down each score line into four “quarters” for each 10-minute period. Washington’s best “quarter” is actually the first, during which UW outscores teams by 1.0 point per game. (Their worst “quarter” is the fourth, though that’s not especially telling because of the way teams trying to catch up late in games by intentionally fouling and shooting threes skews the numbers.)

The numbers get a lot more interesting when you account for quality of competition. Using Sports-Reference.com’s Simple Rating System and accounting for home court, I rated how the Huskies could be expected to play against each opponent on their schedule. Divide that by four and you have an expectation for each quarter to compare to actual performance. I then broke down the schedule into three types of games:

– Likely wins (Washington favored by at least eight points)- Close games (Projected margins of five points or fewer)
– Likely losses (Opponent favored by at least seven points)

Suddenly, a pattern emerges. In likely wins, the Huskies average 2.0 points worse than expected in the first quarter. They’re 1.6 points better than expected in the first quarter in close games, and 2.2 points better in likely losses.

There’s still an effect, though not quite as consistent, in the second quarter, and it entirely disappears in the third quarter before reemerging in the fourth quarter, largely for the reasons described above. (In likely wins, the Huskies were often ahead and playing reserves, for example.)

I’m normally hesitant to discuss quarter-by-quarter trends because I think they mostly represent statistical noise. (These samples, for that matter, are too small for statistical significance.) In this case, though, there’s an explanatory relationship. Lorenzo Romar talked after the Utah and Oregon State games about his team looking at the opposition’s record. USC isn’t as obviously a lesser foe — the Trojans now have a better conference record than UW — but that game still generated less excitement than the previous four games against the top four teams in the conference.

Washington wouldn’t necessarily have won any of those games without the poor start — USC and Utah had narrow edges over the final 30 minutes — but the Huskies certainly would have helped their chances of avoiding costly losses. Now that the team has, in Romar’s words, “zero margin for error,” motivation should not be an issue. It’s hard to imagine a team worse than .500 in conference play looking past anyone.

Tonight’s game against rival Oregon should generate plenty of excitement. We’ll know on Saturday when the Beavers visit Hec Ed whether the Huskies have been able to lick their problem with slow starts.

After the Washington Huskies lost 71-60 Sunday night at USC, the stat everybody will cite all week is that the Huskies have lost six of their last seven after starting 4-0 in Pac-12 play. The narrative is easy: After a hot start, Washington has since nosedived and struggled badly. The reality is a bit more complex.

With the exception of the win at California, basically every conference game Washington has played has been in doubt during the final four minutes, meaning a couple of breaks here and there can make an enormous difference in terms of wins and losses.

Early in the season, the Huskies got those bounces at Washington State and Stanford. They easily could have lost one or both of those two. Lately, with the exception of the Arizona State game, they haven’t gotten the same breaks. Take away Larry Drew II‘s game-winning shot at the buzzer, and change one possession against Arizona, and Washington could easily be 3-4 in the last seven games.

Based on the typical relationship between point differential and record, the Huskies were really a 3-1 team during their first four games. They’ve really been slightly better than a 2-5 team during the last seven.

When you add the two segments of the season together, however, they fit. 5-6 is about where the Huskies should be at this point of the season, given they’ve been outscored by four points aggregate in their 11 conference games. On average, that should translate into a 6-5 record on occasion but most often a 5-6 record. So Washington is what its record says it is.

Before the Washington Huskies take on UCLA this evening, we’re midway through the Pac-12 schedule, which seems like a good opportunity to take stock of where the Huskies are after the ups and downs of the first five weekends of conference play.

Washington is 5-4 and tied for fifth place in the Pac-12, which about reflects the way the team has played to date. The Huskies have outscored conference opponents by 0.02 points per possession, which is consistent with a record around 5-4. Colorado, the other team with a +0.02 differential, is 4-5 in the standings, but then we know that’s not their real record.

KenPom.com shows Washington playing the conference’s second most difficult schedule thus far. (Note that this, and all other conference rankings, does not include last night’s pair of games.) That seems a little odd given the Huskies still have two matchups left with UCLA and a trip to Arizona on the schedule, but they’re also finished with Cal and Stanford, the second-best travel pair of schools this year after Arizona and Arizona State. (Washington and Washington State rate as the easiest travel pair, ahead of Colorado/Utah, with whom the Huskies are also done.)

Offense

Washington sits fourth in the conference at 101.3 points per 100 possessions. Overall, this is a below-average offense by Lorenzo Romar stanards ranked ahead of just two UW teams in the last decade — 2007-08 and last season.

The presence of C.J. Wilcox and Scott Suggs means we tend to think of shooting as the Huskies’ strength, but the team is actually below average when it comes to effective field-goal percentage in conference play and marginally better than average from beyond the arc (33.8 percent, fifth). While Wilcox has kept up his end of the bargain, Suggs’ 36.8 percent three-point shooting is way down from the 45.0 percent he shot as a junior before his redshirt year.

Instead, Washington is better than the average Pac-12 offense largely because of a single factor, the most consistent one throughout the Romar era: Offensive rebounding. In Pac-12 play, they’re rebounding 36.9 percent of their own misses, miles ahead of No. 2 Arizona (33.9 percent).

If there’s one area the Huskies have struggled, it’s taking care of the basketball. They’re 10th in the conference in turnover rate, which is uncharacteristic of a team with a veteran backcourt. For all the grumbling about Tony Wroten‘s miscues, last year’s team was much better at taking care of the basketball. To find an equivalently turnover-prone UW squad, you have to go back to 2008-09, when Isaiah Thomas started at point guard as a freshman.

I think the issue is tied to the Huskies’ emphasis on feeding the post. For example, UW guards had three entry passes stolen by defenders fronting the post on Saturday against Arizona State. Scott Suggs also had a similar turnover when Aziz N’Diaye was rolling to the basket after the pick-and-roll, and two of N’Diaye’s four miscues came when he was in the post.

As appealing as the high-percentage looks N’Diaye post-ups can create may be, they come with a cost in terms of turnovers because he is not a good ballhandler. The post entries weren’t his fault — one was a pass to Kemp — but they still have to figure into the math on feeding the post. It needs to remain just one part of a balanced Husky offensive diet.

Defense

Until last weekend’s wildly different pair of games against the Arizona schools, the Washington offense had been highly consistent in Pac-12 play, netting between 0.97 and 1.05 points per trip every game. By contrast, the Husky defense has been wildly up and down, holding three opponents (Cal, Colorado and Arizona) below 0.85 points per possession while giving up more than 1.05 points per trip during four of the last five games.

Three-point defense regression didn’t really hit UW until Saturday, when the Huskies needed far and away their best offensive outing of the year to overcome the Sun Devils’ scorching 12-19 shooting from beyond the arc. But the defense still collapsed because of open looks in the paint and second chances.

The common denominator when the Washington defense breaks down is that N’Diaye gets pulled away from the basket, leaving it unprotected. This isn’t really anything that N’Diaye is doing wrong; teams are simply using the pick-and-roll to draw him to the perimeter or forcing him to step up in help defense. In basketball parlance, the Huskies have done a poor job of “helping the helper” — having another player step into the paint when N’Diaye is busy guarding the pick-and-roll or cutting off a drive to the basket.

That’s why I’m positive about Shawn Kemp, Jr. claiming the starting job at power forward. Part of the issue is that the other Washington players just aren’t big enough to pose a threat to most players in the paint. Desmond Simmons, the previous starter at power forward, isn’t really a shot blocker. Kemp gives the Huskies another rim protector when N’Diaye is outside the paint.

I was skeptical that the Kemp-N’Diaye combination was quick enough to play extended minutes together, but so far I’ve been proven wrong by the results in terms of plus-minus. The numbers from the last two games are stunning. Washington outscored the Arizona schools by a combined 19 points with both big men on the floor, but was -21 with just N’Diaye.

This came despite the fact that Arizona State’s Jonathan Gilling is one of the worst possible matchups for Kemp, who wasn’t able to protect the rim because he was glued to the sharpshooter. Gilling got his points beyond the arc, but the Huskies made him pay with Kemp’s post-up ability at the other end, turning the mismatch into a net positive.

Looking Ahead

To enter the Pac-12 Tournament with a legitimate shot at an at-large bid, Washington probably needs to finish 11-7 in conference play, meaning a 6-3 record over the second half. That’s doable, but it will require the Huskies to find a win on the road against either the L.A. or Arizona schools and win out at home, beating both Oregon and UCLA. And there certainly can’t be any missteps like a loss to Utah that isn’t looking much better a few weeks in the rear-view mirror.

Optimists can point to the growth of underclassmen Andrews and Kemp as reason for hope. Both are significantly better than they were even at the start of conference play (in Kemp’s case, partly because he was coming back from injury). Gaddy seems to have turned back the confidence issues that had him in a shooting slump a few weeks ago, but Andrews has still earned the right to play down the stretch like he did in both games over the weekends. The scoring punch he — and, to a lesser extent, Kemp — provides has made Washington somewhat less dependent on Wilcox’s production.

Pessimists can note this team is still one injury away from being reduced to a six-player rotation and becoming a significantly worse team, which could quickly derail any tournament talk.

We’ll know which group wins out in a little more than four weeks.

If there was a bright spot to Saturday’s 74-65 home loss by the Washington Huskies to the last-place Utah Utes — and that requires not just a glass-half-full disposition, but a glass-overflowing one — it was the performance of redshirt freshman guard Andrew Andrews, who scored a team-high 17 points. Down the stretch, it was Andrews, not senior starter Abdul Gaddy, who ran the point for the Huskies. That change ought to become permanent.

Thanks to StatSheet.com’s plus-minus data and Lorenzo Romar‘s tight perimeter rotation, we can see how Washington has played with each combination of its four guards on the court during the first five games of Pac-12 play.

Andrews-Wilcox-Suggs: +17.4 points per 40 minutes
Gaddy-Wilcox-Suggs: +8.4
Gaddy-Andrews-Wilcox: -0.9
Gaddy-Andrews-Suggs: -6.9

Besides indicating that C.J. Wilcox simply can’t afford to rest for more than brief stretches, the plus-minus data also suggests that Andrews has been the superior option to Gaddy at the point. Yet Gaddy has played more than two-thirds of the minutes where the two players haven’t been on the court together.

If you’re not convinced by five games of noisy plus-minus data, I can’t blame you, but in this case their conclusion is backed up both by the eye test and individual statistics. Gaddy’s shooting slump is so far in his head that he’s not just missing, but missing badly. Gaddy is shooting 22.2 percent on threes and 27.0 percent on twos in Pac-12 play. Opponents have taken notice and are sagging off him, gumming up the rest of the Washington offense and making life more difficult for Wilcox and Scott Suggs on the wings and Aziz N’Diaye in the post.

At the same time Gaddy is dealing with a crisis of confidence, Andrews is seeing his grow each game. He’s made 57.9 percent of his twos and 38.5 percent of his threes against conference opponents, providing the Huskies needed scoring. While Andrews is much more prone to turnovers than Gaddy, his decision-making is showing signs of improving. After committing seven turnovers in his first three conference games, Andrews had just two combined against Colorado and Utah this week.

I understand if Romar is reluctant to publicly embarrass his senior leader by benching him for a freshman. Gaddy has been a great teammate throughout a career that hasn’t gone quite the way either he or Washington fans envisioned, and his defensive effort against bigger Spencer Dinwiddie was a major factor in the win over the Buffaloes. So it makes sense to keep Gaddy in the starting lineup to preserve his remaining self-assurance. What I’ll be watching instead is the ratio of Gaddy’s minutes to Andrews’ playing time. That should be close to even going forward, if not tilting toward the freshman’s direction.

Andrews has demonstrated throughout his redshirt freshman season that he’s a key part of the future of this program. Now it looks like that future might be here already.

With just less than two minutes remaining in last night’s 64-54 Washington win over visiting Colorado, Buffaloes forward Andre Roberson banked in a three-pointer. Unless you happen to be an NBA scout taking note of Roberson’s range, you probably didn’t pay the shot much attention. With Colorado down 11 at the time, it mostly served to prolong the final two minutes by encouraging Tad Boyle to foul and Lorenzo Romar to take timeouts to protect the lead.

What made Roberson’s triple notable was that it was the Buffaloes’ only three-pointer of the night in 10 attempts. In a game where points were at a premium, the Huskies’ 18-3 advantage from long distance was a major key to the win. Consider it an off night for Colorado, which usually makes 35.7 percent of its three-point tries, but part of a larger trend for UW.

The difference between Washington’s 4-0 start to conference play and their underwhelming 8-5 non-conference mark — which included home losses to Albany and Nevada — has been largely at the defensive end of the floor. The turnaround really dates to the Huskies’ final game before Pac-12 play, a 61-53 loss at Connecticut that was attributable to an off shooting night from star C.J. Wilcox, not the defense. Before that game, UW was allowing opponents to score more points per 100 possessions than their adjusted season-long marks (via KenPom.com). In plain English, the Huskies were worse than the average NCAA defense through their first 12 games. That’s bad news for a power-conference team, and explains the upsets Washington suffered.

Starting in Storrs, the Huskies have been a juggernaut defensively. Their last five opponents have collectively averaged 17.0 points per 100 possessions fewer than their season-long adjusted marks. Only one team in the country (Louisville) has been so stingy over the course of the season. There are multiple explanations for the turnaround. A healthy roster has allowed Romar to trim his rotation. A week of practice during the holidays may have given the coaching staff more time to focus on defense after spending early practice time implementing a new high-post offense. And Aziz N’Diaye has been dominant in the paint, successfully avoiding foul trouble to stay on the court for more than 30 minutes a night in conference play.

Beyond that, Washington has been extraordinarily fortunate in terms of opponents’ three-point shooting. Over the past five games, Husky opponents have shot 12-of-67 (17.9 percent) from downtown. While there have been some middling three-point opponents in the group, weighted for their attempts in each game, this group should have shot 32.8 percent. Colorado and Connecticut both would have scored nine more points had they merely reached their season average in those respective games. The impact was even greater in the Stanford and WSU games. Both teams made two fewer threes than expected, which could have swung close games.

Now, you’re probably protesting that improved three-point defense reflects everything else Washington has tightened up. Unfortunately, that doesn’t square with the research done by Ken Pomeroy, who has found that teams have little control over the three-point percentage their opponents shoot over the course of full seasons, let alone five-game stretches. You know who’s an example of this? The Huskies. When I took a look at the team in December, I noted that one reason Washington’s defense was playing so poorly was bad luck in terms of opponent three-point shooting. Through Dec. 22, Husky opponents should have shot 34.0 percent from beyond the arc. They actually hit 37.5 percent, though it’s hard to find an example of hot shooting actually causing Washington to lose (the two best examples were Seton Hall, which the Huskies won anyway, and a blowout loss to Colorado State).

Using the same method of expected three-point percentage, we can construct ratings for each of Washington’s games independent of three-point defense and summarize the two portions of the season (note that Pac-12 includes the UConn game, as before):

Stretch   DRtg   OppORtg  AdjDRtg   3P%luck  No3DRtg  No3AdjDrtg
----------------------------------------------------------------
NonC     101.6    101.0    - 0.6      - 8      98.6      +2.2
Pac12     88.0    105.1    +17.0      +10      97.2      +8.1
Total     97.7    102.2    + 4.5      + 2      98.2      +3.9

That’s a lot of column headers, so let me explain. DRtg is the actual points per 100 possessions opponents have scored in each stretch. OppORtg is the opponents’ season-long Adjusted Offensive Efficiency — what we’d expect them to do against an average opponent. So AdjDRtg is the difference — how much better the Huskies are than average.

3P%luck is the number of threes better or worse teams have done than expected. No3DRtg is how many points per 100 possessions teams would have scored had they made threes at their season-long percentage against the Huskies, and No3AdjDRtg uses this figure to see how the rest of the Washington defense compares to NCAA average.

Even if you don’t believe Pomeroy’s research, it’s clear that taking out three-pointers produces a more consistent view of defenses. More than 20 percent of the variance in UW’s adjusted defense from game to game can be explained solely by opponents’ three-point shooting. Factoring in the variability in three-point defense, the Huskies were above average all along, though they have gotten better over the last five games at other facets of defense.

The three-independent figure would put Washington about 50th in the nation defensively, which is similar to where the Huskies have been the last two seasons. Add in an offense that has improved slightly from 2011-12 and this Washington team now looks capable of ranking in the upper third of the Pac-12 and challenging for an NCAA tournament berth. That’s as big a turnaround as the three-point defense has made.

AN ASIDE ON LUCK: I know using the term “luck” bothers some readers because of the fact that it doesn’t take into account the skill, strategy and execution involved on the court. I would compare the issue to forms of gambling that include both skill and luck, like blackjack and poker. Over the course of a single hand, or even a night of play, randomness is the dominant factor, which is why we say poker players get lucky or unlucky. It’s only in the long run, over thousands of hands, that the randomness evens out and we can tell stronger players from weaker ones. Three-point defense is similar, except that the college season doesn’t provide thousands of attempts. There’s not enough time for the differences between teams to become evident. So three-point defense is in fact a skill; it just can’t be determined from opponents’ three-point percentage, which tends to be misleading.