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Results of the Pac-10 writers’ survey on men’s basketball

by on Mar. 10, 2010, under Sports

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Jeff Faraudo of the Oakland Tribune has compiled and published his annual survey on Pac-10 basketball from media who cover the league.

You can find the results here and you can find anonymous comments from the writers here.

Some points of interest:

Arizona freshman forward Derrick Williams, in a tight vote of the 31 media members, was chosen as the Pac-10 player who will be the best NBA player in five years. Can’t argue too much with that, although I went with Washington State shooting guard Klay Thompson, commenting that “He’ll be nice and strong by then.”

Williams received eight votes, UCLA freshman forward Tyler Honeycutt got seven votes and Thompson had six, while several others split the remainder. Some jokester voted for Stanford women’s player Jayne Appel. We writers are a hoot.

Williams was, as expected, the landslide winner as the league’s top freshman. One of the writers’ comments: “Really mature game. Somebody check his birth certificate.”

Also notable is this question: Which team will win the 2010-11 Pac-10 title?

The winner: Arizona.

The Wildcats edged UCLA, with 13 votes to the Bruins’ 12. Arizona State had two.

Much still depends on how teams finish in recruiting in the offseason, but coach Sean Miller won’t have the benefit of modest expectations next season. The Cats will be expected to deliver.

One Pac-10 wag, while predicting Arizona as the best in the league next season, wrote: “Please, no. Make it stop. I can’t endure this again. Okay, okay. Arizona, but I’m not happy about it.”

None of the 31, however, picked UA to win the Pac-10 tournament, which starts Thursday. Washington is the favorite, picking up 16 votes.

The first instruction in the survey was to describe this unusual Pac-10 season in one word that is fit to print. I went with “Ishtar.” Check out the rest of the comments, and if you have a better one-word idea, leave it in the comments section.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:35 am and is filed under Sports. Tags for this post: , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  • Mark B. Evans

    My one word: Fun.
     
    My more than one word expanding on the above one word: In some games they fought like Wildcats. In other games, they hid under the couch like frightened kitties. They played hard, at times. They played soft, at times. And they played tough down the stretch. They could have quit after the Cal blowout, but didn’t. Several players (Momo) showed it wasn’t all about them and they could be coached and learn to play team basketball (not always the case with some of the players Olson recruited in his waning years). After the implosion of the Olson era and the Tim Floyd fiasco, I was expecting UA to be a horrible, last-place team. Fourth place in the Pac-10, sweeping UCLA, beating ASU and buzzer beaters galore made this a fun season, albeit painful one, to watch.
     
    For next year, we need a center who can rebound and block shots, a sixth-man 3-point shooter a seventh-man defensive stopper and Parrom, Fogg, Jones and Williams to become a solid scoring core and this team could be one of the greats. Whodathunkit?

  • vegasallen

    A Lorenzo Romar coached team to win a tournament? That really strains the credibility of the poll. My pick: ASU

  • Pingback: No. 5 UCLA (13-17) vs. No. 4 Arizona (16-14) | "Tell them … tell the team to bear down"

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