A Slurry of Salacious Games in Store

First, to last night:

Arizona St. 47 Arizona 71
The Wildcats took care of business as expected, but did so in a 15 possession slower game than what they've been averaging.
This 55 possession game saw some "expected" effective shooting and efficiency from Arizona (59% efg and 1.29 points-per-possession) and a predicted poor performance from the Sun Devils at 44% efg and .85 ppp. If the 'Cats weren't hitting nylon, they were grabbing 10 of their 25 misses on the night, led by Chase Budinger's 5 offensive boards, for a stellar 24% individual rate. He also led all scorers with 21 points on 12 shots for a 1.37 points-per-weighted shot average.


On to tonight's festivities:

Some big steps back or forward can be taken with this week's slate of games (well, in this strong of a Pac10, I guess every weekend means a lot).

UCLA and Oregon can really distance themselves with at least a split, if not more on their road swings to the Bay area and the Apple state respectively.
Or they could easily lose both, and really make the Pac10 leader board a jumbled mess for all to grab.

Oregon at Washington
Huskies are almost essentially out of the NCAA picture, unless they run the table, starting with the home stand against the Oregon schools. Aaron Brooks, after his infamous elbow will be finishing off his suspension by sitting out this game. No one probably predicted that the Ducks would've preferred him to sit out this over sitting out the Wazzu game.
Washington will run big and attempt to get Maarty Leunen in foul trouble early in order to make Coach Ernie Kent really stretch the effectiveness of his already-shallow bench. A big plus for Oregon, is that Tajuan Porter has improved his play as of late, and will be called on to shoulder some of the void left from Brooks' absence.


Oregon St. at Washington St.
The Cougs shouldn't have an issue with the Beaver's visit to Pullman, in the first home match as a ranked team in 57 years. Wazzu is leading the league in efficiency marginthanks to an offense that doesn't turn the ball over and a defense that is only allowing .93 points to be scored each possession. On the other end, Oregon St. is last in efficiency margin, giving up a huge .18 more points per possession than they're putting in. This shouldn't be a problem for the Cougs as long as they don't look ahead to their big showdown on Saturday


UCLA at California
Two similarly efficient offenses face off against two very different defensi. UCLA's claim to fame this season has been it's staunch effort against some high-powered offenses and the numbers back it up. A second-best .95 ppp allowed along with a second best-20.9% turnover rate. While they're roughly middle of the pack in shooting percentage allowed, they are hauling in those misses at an astounding 79.9% defensive rebounding rate. Cal isn't exactly a solid offensive rebounding team either. This is a good test to for the Bears to boost their NCAA profile

USC at Stanford
In a similar NCAA boat as Cal, Stanford and USC desperately need to start adding some more marquee wins to their resume after somewhat lax pre-conference schedules. Nick Young and Taj Gibson will have a little more work to keep their high PPWS numbers up against the presence of the Lopez brothers. On the other end, the Cardinal have been inconsistent as of late, shooting 44% and 67% efg in their split at the Oregon schools last weekend. Going up against an extremely strong shooting defense in USC will probably expose that weakness even more unless they can improve the ball rotation using their bigs.
Either way, one of these teams is adding a strong W to their list.