Huskies blast Cardinal, 94-61

Who were those guys? Stanford may still have been asking itself that as the Cardinal went back to its hotel last night, likely still shaken from the 40-minute headlock they had just endured at the hands of the Washington men's basketball team. You knew the Huskies wanted to show everyone they could still win, still fight, after consecutive 17-point losses in the desert last weekend. But nobody knew they would respond quite like this. Washington looked nothing like a team riding a three-game losing streak during its best effort of the season, slamming Stanford with a 94-61 beating so thorough that even the 9,720 in attendance at Hec Edmundson Pavilion seemed more surprised than elated. The Huskies, at long last, looked like the Huskies. "We had to come out and make a statement," said junior Justin Holiday, who scored six points, grabbed seven rebounds and was a defensive menace in his first career start. "You have to come out and play hard, or you're going to keep going down to the bottom of the Pac-10, and we don't want to do that." If they keep playing like they did last night, that won't be possible. Matthew Bryan-Amaning throwing down a one-handed tomahawk on top of someone in transition? Sure. Bucket and the foul. Quincy Pondexter doing the same just one possession after Justin Holiday converted an alley-oop layup? Yeah, OK. Anything they wanted, they got, things looking just as easy as they did hard last weekend. "We just got back to playing nitty-gritty Husky basketball," Pondexter said. Holiday, who may have been the grittiest Husky on this night, seemed to be making up for lost time after sitting out the Arizona trip due to eligibility problems. He was Stanford's problem last night. The junior was all over the place defensively, knocking balls out of passing lanes and even knocking down an outside jumper to spark the Huskies' most furious first half of the conference season. They pressed. They trapped. They forced turnovers - 20 of 'em. They were everything they weren't against Arizona and Arizona State last weekend, never relenting in putting forth the kind of performance that makes you think maybe these guys are finally starting to get it. And before the Cardinal (8-8, 2-2 Pac-10) could stop to figure out exactly what hit it, the Huskies had rattled off a 15-0 run that spanned more than seven minutes and gave them a 22-6 lead, reminding everyone exactly why this team was ranked in the top 15 earlier this season. Isaiah Thomas scored 10 of his 15 points before halftime - at which point the Huskies led 41-22 - watching most of the second half from the bench while waving his arms and cheering as the reserves mopped up the blowout. "We started on Tuesday with that mindset that we're just going to bring it and have that killer mentality that nobody's going to come in here, especially, and beat us," Thomas said. As overmatched as the Huskies (11-5, 2-3 Pac-10) looked last weekend, that was Stanford last night, and then some. UW led by 41 at one point, holding Stanford to 30-percent shooting in the first half before walking away with its biggest win over the Cardinal in program history. The second half was more of the same, Pondexter scoring 14 of his game-high 27 points in the first 6:32 to extinguish any hopes of a Cardinal comeback. He also had 10 rebounds. Even walk-on Brendan Sherrer got into the game with 2:31 to go, the final indication that yes, this was just about as thorough as a butt-whuppin' can get. "I like the direction that we're headed based on tonight," Romar said. "We're not in a position to make a broad prediction where we're going to be or where we're going to finish. We have to climb out of that hole somehow, and I thought we took a step toward climbing out of it tonight." A leap is more like it. Reach Sports Editor Christian Caple at sports@dailyuw.com.

Huskies blast Cardinal, 94-61

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