If you were one of those people who went out of your way to avoid watching Washington State play basketball last season, no one can blame you; and second, and more to the point, you missed out on watching one of the best players in the conference put on a pretty impressive performance out of the spotlight. You see, DaVonte Lacy was pretty amazing last year. Just look at his traditional numbers (19.4 PPG, 4.2 RPG, 1.4 APG, 42.9 FG%) and yeah, whatever, they’re pretty good. But take those numbers, and some of the advanced ones, in the context of what Washington State basketball was last season, and they paint a picture that was more readily apparent when you watched the Cougars play: You see, Lacy was a special player on a team that was looking up at mediocre.
DaVonte Lacy Blew Up In His Junior Year Despite Drawing The Attention Of Opposing Defenses (credit: Dean Hare)
The fact is that the 2013-14 Cougars did not have a whole lot in the way of players who could hurt you offensively. Freshman Que Johnson had some moments here and there. Senior power forward D.J. Shelton could blow hot, at times, but tended to drift too far from the lane for a 6’10” guy. And Royce Woolridge may have started the season as a hot name, but he turned into a disaster as the year went on. In other words, when Washington State took the court, the opposing team knew that stopping Lacy was priority number one; nobody else the Cougs threw out there could be considered a consistent threat. So, Lacy put up those 19.4 points per game in the face of defenses dedicated to slowing him.
What’s more, Lacy did this in a season when he was slowed by a pair of injuries. Just after Christmas, he had his appendix removed, and while an appendectomy may be fairly common nowadays, it is still major surgery. For comparison’s sake, UCLA’s Travis Wear missed more than three weeks of action after his appendectomy at the start of last season. Lacy was back in a week. To be fair, when he did come back, he lasted only 11 minutes against Arizona State before sustaining a rib injury that sidelined him for the rest of January. And just to prove that the guy was human, it took him a whole game to get back into the swing of things. But when he did, he closed in style, averaging 22.4 points per game in the final 10 games of Washington State’s season.
So, let’s tie those two paragraphs above together. How bad were the Cougs offensively without Lacy in the mix? In the seven games that Lacy missed against legitimate competition (we’re throwing out the game against Mississippi Valley State), the Cougars averaged 0.77 points per possession. In the other 17 games against either teams in power conferences or among KenPom’s top 100 teams (so we’re including Gonzaga. TCU, Butler, Purdue, Saint Joseph’s, UTEP and the rest of the team’s Pac-12 competition), the Cougars averaged 1.01 points per possession.
In other words, he led the team in the face of taking on every team’s best perimeter defender every night. He led the team in spite of overcoming two injuries. He led the team despite the fact that he wasn’t getting a ton of help from his teammates. And he led the team while being a veteran leader. But what makes Lacy more than just a bomber who scored a bunch of points en route to his team having a completely forgettable season is the fact that Lacy did so in a quietly efficient manner. His shooting numbers went up across the board as a junior, despite the increased attention. His three-point shooting jumped to 38.7 percent, and his two-point field goals jumped to 48.1 percent. And perhaps most impressively, his free throw shooting skyrocketed from 68.8 percent as a sophomore to 83.5 percent as a junior, all while he was getting to the line at a career-high rate.
All of which leads us to this preseason, with Washington State fans looking at a roster that isn’t markedly different from last year’s squad. Johnson is once again Lacy’s prime running mate. There are also a handful of forgettable wings, underachieving big men, and maybe a few newcomers who can contribute right away. But the big difference is in the first seat on the sideline, as Ernie Kent takes over at head coach from the departed Ken Bone. And while you can usually take such promises with a grain of salt when they come from a new head coach, Kent is promising a new up-tempo brand of basketball. Given that Bone’s style over the last few years of his career plummeted to the basketball equivalent of a dirge, you can bet that Kent’s style will feel a lot more like dance music. And given that Lacy shone in his rare transition opportunities last season, additional clean looks in the open floor should only help his overall production.
Kent, for his part, is already showing appreciation for his senior leader, praising him for his steadfastness in sticking with the program. “The thing that I like about him the most, you’ve got so many transfers this day in age, he stuck it out. He stayed here at Washington State and I’m sure there were people in his ear telling him to transfer. You just don’t find that kind of character amongst young people, to stay with their program even though they didn’t have a lot of success. He deserves to have success this year.” Certainly, Lacy deserves for his team to have some success, and Lacy can take pride in knowing that whatever success these Cougars will have this season will probably have a lot to do with him.