Inside The Huskies

Matthews Leaves UW Basketball Team After One Season

The Tacoma product is back in the transfer portal.

Dan Raley

In this story:

Emmitt Matthews Jr. used to speak in an upbeat manner about having his family members, even his grandfather, come out and watch him play for the University of Washington basketball team.

Much was made of Matthews (West Virginia) and three other locally produced players — Terrell Brown Jr. (Arizona), Daejon Davis (Stanford) and PJ Fuller (TCU) — returning home from other schools across the country to see what they could together to make the Huskies winners. 

On Monday, the novelty of all this apparently had worn off as word circulated that Matthews, a 6-foot-7 senior starting forward and the UW's top player returning, had entered the transfer portal once more. He has a year of eligibility remaining.

Matthews' departure is a decided blow to the UW, which already had Brown and Davis, both starting guards, use up their collegiate eligibility and 6-foot-11 starting center Nate Roberts leave early, indicating he intended to pursue a pro basketball career. Yet another guard, the little-used Dominiq Penn, also transferred out.

Matthews was the Huskies' second-leading scorer this past season at 11.7 points per game, second only to Brown's Pac-12-leading 21.7 average, for a 17-14 team that didn't qualify for a postseason tournament.

From Tacoma, Matthews originally committed to Connecticut before a coaching change made him back out and sign with West Virginia, where he played for three seasons. 

It's possible he took a look at Mike Hopkins' current UW roster and wasn't overly encouraged by it because it notably lacks proven big men.

At this point, the Huskies' only starter returning is guard Jamal Bey and he wasn't even sure at season's end whether he would be back.

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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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