Utah Hoops: From Oregon To Washington

Jan 4, 2014; Salt Lake City, UT, USA; Utah Utes guard Brandon Taylor (11) drives during the second half against the Oregon State Beavers at Jon M. Huntsman Center. Utah won 80-69. Mandatory Credit: Russ Isabella-USA TODAY Sports

So what do we know about the Utes after the Oregon teams came to town.

They scared the hell out of Oregon before late game execution killed them, which is an on going problem.  Oregon St. despite playing defense for about five total minutes gave us a scare.  But then again they did that to Colorado as well (side note Colorado beat Oregon).

A special shout out to Brandon Taylor for pulling our bacon out of the fire on Saturday.

So I’m not sure we really have any more answers than we did a week ago.  The cheerleaders are going to say, we’re a couple of hoops from undefeated.  The cynics will point out, we lost close games to good teams last year too and the same thing keeps hurting us.  The cynics would also point out that of the three good teams we’ve played Utah is 1-2.  The cheerleaders would counter with we don’t have any bad losses either.

And all of it is true.

So we’re a week into conference play and still don’t quite know what this team is.  Perhaps they are all of it.  With altitude and crowd, the JMHC is suddenly a tough place to play.  But we’re about to go on the road for the second and third times this year and have no idea what that will detail.

As for the teams that are coming, we’ll talk about them a little more in depth in the coming days.  Washington looked resurgent on the Arizona road trip and Wazzu is DOA and will be hiring a new basketball coach at years end.

The one thing you can draw is that Wazzu is a must win game for this Ute team.