By Christian Caple
The News Tribune
SEATTLE — In the end, the scoreboard showed the right numbers for the Washington Huskies. But they weren’t happy about how they got there.
Just ask them.
“That wasn’t our team out there tonight, with the exception of about six minutes,” Huskies coach Lorenzo Romar said of UW’s 76-69 victory over University of the Pacific on Sunday night at KeyArena as part of the inaugural Marv Harshman Classic.
“We didn’t play the way we wanted to play,” sophomore point guard Nigel Williams-Goss said. “We kind of jumped out early, they cut the lead down, and from there on we kind of played sluggish and did things that weren’t us, were uncharacteristic of us.”
Three games into the season, it’s hard to know just yet what to expect from the Huskies (3-0). But they made it clear after Sunday’s lethargic, uninteresting game in a mostly empty arena that such an effort isn’t the kind of performance with which they’d like to identify.
Aside from those first five or six minutes, anyway. Washington scored the game’s first seven points and held a 14-1 lead before the Tigers made their first field goal with 15:12 left in the first half.
Mike Anderson made a 3-pointer. Shawn Kemp Jr., who again led the Huskies in scoring with a career-high-tying 18 points, made an easy layup and slammed down a dunk.
It was 14-3, and five minutes later, it wasn’t. Pacific ripped off 13 points without a UW basket, took a 16-14 lead, and the struggle was permanent thereafter.
“I thought we came out with a lot of intensity, we were together, and then we dropped off,” Romar said. “We began to make substitutions and we weren’t able to maintain that level of intensity, and Pacific did a good job of coming back, being relentless and being aggressive, and got right back in the ball game.”
But the paint became a frequent destination for the Tigers, who shot only 40.4 percent from the field but made more easy baskets than the Huskies wanted. T.J. Wallace, Pacific’s leading scorer, finished with a game-high 24 points. Wallace made only 6-of-19 from the field, but was able to navigate his way to the rim often enough to earn 15 free throws.
Dulani Robinson, a 5-foot-9 guard, also gave the Huskies trouble and finished with 14 points. It didn’t help that 7-foot center Robert Upshaw, who blocked 14 shots in his first two games, fouled out and played only eight minutes.
“(There were) too many layups we gave up tonight,” said Williams-Goss, who had 17 points and six assists. “We had been doing a really good job of keeping people out of the paint, and tonight, it just wasn’t us. We’ve just got to get back right.”
The Huskies play next on Thanksgiving against San Jose State in the first round of the Wooden Legacy tournament in Anaheim.
“We need to shore up some things heading into Anaheim,” Williams-Goss said, “but we felt good moving to 3-0.”
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