The Washington Huskies might not like the questions, but they know exactly how to make them stop – win a game on the road. With an 0-4 record away from Alaska Airlines Arena, the Huskies might actually need to win more than one game in unfriendly confines to assuage the doubters.
So until they do, they are going to be asked about why they don’t.
The Huskies will get the chance tonight when they play their first Pacific-12 Conference road game against the Colorado Buffaloes at the Coors Event Center in Boulder, Colo.
It’s kind of important that UW figures out how to win on the road. Their nonconference road losses have made it almost impossible for the Huskies to earn an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament. They’ll need to win plenty of Pac-12 games away from home to win the regular-season title or at least pad their now deficient résumé.
This isn’t the first Huskies team to struggle on the road. In away games during the last four seasons, the Huskies have been above .500 only once.
What makes it so hard to win away from home?
“When you’re away from home, you don’t have the crowd motivating you,” UW coach Lorenzo Romar said. “We go on these frenzied runs – these spurts – at home. What about when you don’t have those on the road?”
What happens is, the Huskies get tight. The ball movement stops, the quick shots start flying and the defense becomes porous.
Suddenly, that one-point lead has turned into an 11-point deficit and there is no crowd to provide a motivational and emotional bandage to stop the bleeding.
The formula to fix it is ultra-simple.
“Your defense has to carry and sustain you through those times, and you can’t fuel their offense by taking bad, quick shots,” Romar said.
Go back and look at the road losses and there are extended periods where the Huskies didn’t defend, particularly against dribble penetration, while also getting stagnant offensively and settling for long, contested jump shots.
The players say they understand what needs to be done.
“I feel like everybody knows what we have to do on the road,” said senior forward Darnell Gant. “There’s no question. We have got to defend, and certain things we do at home we can’t do on the road.”
It’s just a matter of recognizing early when things are starting to unravel and put a stop to it.
“We need to say something before the coaches do,” Gant said.
But who is the player to do that? In the past, it was guys like Jon Brockman and Isaiah Thomas. This team doesn’t have that one dominant personality, yet.
“I’m not sure that it’s one guy. I think it’s going to be a team effort,” C.J. Wilcox said. “We don’t have anybody like Isaiah, who will get up in your face or anything. We have to do it as a team effort and know when we have to buckle down and play right.”
Wilcox earlier in the season admitted “that you do stupid things on the road.”
But it’s not a matter of being stupid. Teams that win on the road limit mental mistakes such as turnovers and defensive lapses. Defensive breakdowns were prevalent in all of UW’s road losses, with opposing guards breaking them down over and over.
Romar thinks those issues have been fixed. The Huskies’ wins over Oregon State and Oregon this past weekend seem to exemplify that.
“Defensively, we are better than we were the last time before when we were on the road,” Romar said.
The Huskies are going to see good defense. Colorado has held its last two opponents – Utah and New Orleans – under 40 points.
“Defensively, they are very fundamentally sound and solid,” Romar said. “They don’t give you many easy baskets. Like Cal and Stanford, they play defense like that. You aren’t going to get anything cheap and easy.”
Kind of like winning on the road, where nothing is cheap or easy.
“We know what we have to do,” Wilcox said.
Now they just have to do it.
Ryan Divish: 253-597-8483 ryan.divish@thenewstribune.com blog.thenewstribune.com/uwsports
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