Inside The Huskies

Huskies Badly Need 3-Point Shooter, So How About Linhardt?

The freshman from King's High saw very limited action.

Dan Raley

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Here's a notable difference between the University of Washington and Gonzaga basketball programs right now.

The Zags take Corey Kispert, a savvy 6-foot-6 shooter out of King's High School and play him in 35 games as a freshman, starting him seven times. 

The Huskies reach out to the same tiny high school north of Seattle and sign Tyler Linhardt, similarly a 6-foot-7 player with an outside touch, and use him in three games over his first season. 

Kispert goes on to start 108 of 137 games for Gonzaga, become a first-team All-America selection and the WCC Player of the Year recipient and leads his team into the 2021 NCAA championship game.

Linhardt gets to play one game in each of the first three months of his UW career, against Utah Tech, Idaho State and Stanford, and and hits 2 of 4 shots, including 1 of 3 from 3-point range.

While the UW coaching staff might tell you Linhardt needed a redshirt year to build college basketball strength or learn how to play zone defense, when your team goes 16-16 largely because it's limited offensively, here's a recommendation.

Get your shooters on the floor.

As a team, the Huskies hit a miserable 31.3 percent from behind the line. For multiple seasons now, opponents simply don't worry about getting beat by the UW from the outside.

While waiting more than a month for Cole Bajema to find his stroke again, what would it have hurt to put Linhardt in there to knock down a couple of threes and keep defenses honest?

It might have made Bajema find his accuracy sooner.

As the Huskies head into a make-or-break-it season for Hopkins, the coach needs all the weapons he can find to stave off a pink slip.

Hopkins will have plenty of playmakers to draw from in Keyon Menifield, Koren Johnson and Wesley Yates, and Keion Brooks should the latter return. The coach will have a pair of able big men in Braxton Meah and Franck Kepnang to influence outcomes inside.

Yet if the Huskies can't find some dependable 3-point shooters to really open up the floor, they continue to flirt with mediocrity.

Imagine if Hopkins opened up his limited rotation and sent in Bajema and Linhardt together off the bench to do some damage in spurts — and it worked. The Triple Twins. 

Or he could just let each one of these players know the team will be going with the hot hand on any given night, and let them shoot for their minutes.

At this stage, the Huskies can't wait for players to become seasoned, pull out of slumps, locate the rim or just dream about being another Corey Kispert.

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Dan Raley
DAN RALEY

Dan Raley has worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, as well as for MSN.com and Boeing, the latter as a global aerospace writer. His sportswriting career spans four decades and he's covered University of Washington football and basketball during much of that time. In a working capacity, he's been to the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the MLB playoffs, the Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship and countless Final Fours and bowl games.

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