Rush The Court

Another week, another group of Pac-12 honors…

Team of the Week – Arizona

There were a lot of good candidates this week (Utah and USC both pulled off upsets over their Pac-12 traveling partners, while Stanford knocked off Oregon, the #10 team in the nation, as part of their most impressive duo of games this year), but anytime a Pac-12 team can go on the road and come home with a pair of wins, they’ve had an excellent week. Washington and Washington State may not be teams competing for the conference lead, but they both have fearsome home court environments, and the Wildcats put all of that aside and came away with a pair of wins. They earned their wins in different ways, but the one constant all weekend was Nick Johnson’s tremendous defense. Against the Huskies, Johnson harassed their leading scorer, C.J. Wilcox, into a 4-of-16 shooting night, holding him more than seven points below his season average. And then, against the Cougars, Johnson helped lock up Mike Ladd, who had been averaging 16.8 points per night in conference play, keeping him to just two points. Coupled with Oregon’s struggles in the Bay Area, the Wildcats’ wins in the Evergreen State take them back into a share of the conference lead.

Player and Newcomer of the Week – Jahii Carson, Arizona State

Carson’s brilliance in his freshman campaign in Tempe has been no secret. He’s averaging better than 18 points and more than five assists per night in his rookie campaign. But this week, he took his game to a different level, taking over both of the Sun Devils’ games against the Washington schools. Against Washington State on Thursday night, Carson hit 10 of his 19 field goal attempts on his way to 25 points, including 21 after the break to bring ASU back from a halftime deficit. Then, against Washington on Saturday, he even improved on that, hitting 13-of-19 on his way to a career-high 32 points. And, with his Sun Devils staring at a nine-point deficit with just five minutes to play, he took over the game, scoring 11 of his team’s last 19 points, including a couple of confident three-pointers. He didn’t miss a shot until ASU’s final possession, when he took the ball hard at the Huskies’ seven-footer Aziz N’Diaye, drew contact as he was knocked to the floor, and yet failed to earn the whistle that would have sent him to the line for the potential game-tying free throws. While that left Arizona State without a win for the first time in four games, they’re now 17-5 overall and just a game back of the conference lead with a 6-3 record. Ponder that for a second. For the most part, Herb Sendek has the exact same guys he had last year in the desert (sub out Trent Lockett, fill in Evan Gordon) with one major exception: Jahii Carson. Last year at this juncture in the Pac-12 season, the Sun Devils were 3-6 in conference and 7-14 overall, were a chore to watch, and had little on the team worth getting excited about. A year and one elite point guard recruit, later, the Sun Devils look like an NCAA Tournament team, are one of the most enjoyable teams in the conference to watch, and guys like Carrick Felix and Jordan Bachynski are having career years. It isn’t all because of Carson (Felix and Bachynski, to name just two, have put in a ton of work to improve their games independent of the point guard), but it is hard to ignore the major impact Carson has had in Tempe.