Husky Men's Basketball Blog

Someone sent me an e-mail a little while ago wondering if I was the one AP voter who voted for the Huskies this week, noting I hadn't yet published my poll.

Here is the AP Poll with UW receiving two votes this week (which could be one voter putting UW No. 24 or two putting them No. 25).

No such luck. Here's my poll, which continues to be sans Huskies:

1, Ohio State
2, Kansas
3, UCLA
4, Wisconsin
5, Memphis
6, Florida
7, Texas A&M
8, North Carolina
9, Washington State
10, Georgetown
11, Louisville
12, Texas
13, Maryland
14, Nevada
15, Virginia
16, Southern Illinois
17, Butler
18, Pitt
19, Tennessee
20, Oregon
21, Notre Dame
22, BYU
23, UNLV
24, USC
25, Winthrop

You'll see I didn't punish UCLA much for losing to UW. There were an awful lot of losses this week, however, so not everybody who lost a game dropped all that much since in a lot of cases, the teams behind them did worse.

Spencer Hawes and Jon Brockman met the media today to discuss their Pac-10 honors. Brockman was named to the All-Pac-10 Team and Hawes to the All-Freshman team.

Here's a little of what they said:

HAWES: "It's a big-time honor, and especially this year with so many great players, it's great to be on that list. I think with the way the season went for me in the middle part, it was kind of a struggle there, so it's nice to get that award in the end.''

BROCKMAN: "I was excited. It's a huge honor just thinking that there are so many good players in the league this year to be named in that group is a huge honor and it's something to be proud of.''

I didn't get the whole team on the previous post so I'll do it here.

The coaches picked just nine players this year for the first time since 1985 --- rule is all players have to be mentioned on at least half the ballots to get on the team (coaches vote for the team but can't vote for their own players or themselves).

Here's the team:

Arron Afflalo, UCLA
Jon Brockman, Washington
Aaron Brooks, Oregon
Darren Collison, UCLA
Lawrence Hill, Stanford
Derrick Low, WSU
Kyle Weaver, WSU
Marcus Williams, Arizona
Nick Young, USC

Player of the year was Afflalo.

Freshman of the year went to Chase Budinger, with five others named to the all-freshman team --- Spencer Hawes, Ryan Anderson of Cal, Taj Gibson of USC, Brook Lopez of Stanford and Tajuan Porter of Oregon.

Tony Bennett of WSU was coach of the year.

As I explained here last week, I would have voted for Brooks. Somebody protested to me that he's a ballhog who got a lot of points just because he took a lot of shots. But in Pac-10 games only, he took just one more shot than Afflalo in one more game, so he didn't really hoist up that many more than Afflalo. I just thought Brooks meant more to his team, especially when considering all the last-second shots he hit.

Coach of the Year is unarguable.

I would have gone with Ryan Anderson for Freshman of the Year --- I thought he was more consistent than Budinger, though Budinger actually ended up averaging 14.9 PPG in conference games to Anderson's 14.7 (Anderson averaged 6.8 rebounds to Budinger's 5.9).

I'm surprised Mustafa Shakur didn't make the team --- I figured he would have been the 10th guy. Shakur's 7.0 assists per game are the most in the conference since Brandon Granville averaged 8.3 for USC in 2000. But evidently all those turnovers --- Shakur had 63 in Pac-10 games only, the most in the conference (Justin Dentmon had 55) --- made the difference.

The All-Pac-10 team is out and Jon Brockman is the lone Husky named.

Spencer Hawes was named to the All-Freshman team as well as honorable mention on the all-conference team, and Quincy Pondexter was also named honorable mention on the freshman team.

UCLA's Arron Afflalo was Player of the Year, Arizona's Chase Budinger was Freshman of the Year and Washington State's Tony Bennett was Coach of the Year.

The entire team can be found here.

Now that the regular season is over seems a good time to compare how the media thought the Pac-10 race would unfold compared to how it actually did.

Here's the official from last November:

1, UCLA (21 first-place votes, 335 total points)
2, Arizona (13, 280)
3, Washington (no first-place votes, 236)
4, Oregon (1, 193 votes)
5, Cal (177 total votes)
6, USC (160 total votes)
7, Stanford (127 total votes)
8, Oregon State (75 total votes)
9, Arizona State (69 total votes)
10, Washington State (54 total votes)

Here is my poll:
1. Arizona
2. UCLA
3. Washington
4. Oregon
5. USC
6. Cal
7. Stanford
8. Washington State
9. Oregon State
10. Arizona State

And here's how it turned out:

1, UCLA, 15-3
2, WSU, 13-5
3, USC 11-7
4, Oregon 11-7
5, Arizona 11-7
6, Stanford 10-8
7, Washington 8-10
8, Cal 6-12
9, Oregon State 3-15
10, Arizona State 2-16

Obviously, all of us were way wrong about the Cougars --- the biggest gainer from the original poll --- and UW --- which suffered the biggest drop. I'd give myself some credit for at least picking WSU eighth, though my selection of Arizona first kind of negates that.

I wasn't sure how well Darren Collinson would replace Jordan Farmar --- obviously, very well --- and I still think Arizona has as much talent as anyone in the conference and underachieved a little bit.

We missed a bit on USC, but some of that was due to where we picked Cal, which at the time had a healthy DeVon Hardin and likely would have come closer to meeting expectations if he hadn't gotten hurt. Cal's drop moved up USC and Stanford. But some of the teams were picked accurately overall --- UCLA as the winner, Oregon at No. 4 and Oregon State and Arizona State as bottom-feeders.