Canzano: Punching back on the court
Washington State is finding a way.
I spoke with Kyle Smith in the offseason. He wasn’t in a good place. His Washington State men’s basketball program had lost multiple players to the NBA and he’d been hit hard — and late — by devastating defections via the transfer portal.
Smith was starting over.
In the subsequent weeks, he added a junior-college transfer, a player from Sonoma State and another from Idaho.
That trio helped lead WSU to a 73-70 win over No. 8 Arizona on Saturday night. It was a stunning victory. And so I called Smith on Sunday morning for a check-in.
“Not going to lie — it feels great,” he told me.
Isaac Jones, a fifth-year forward who played in the Big Sky Conference last season, scored 24 points in Saturday’s upset of Arizona. Myles Rice, a redshirt freshman guard, added 18. And Jaylen Wells, who played Division II basketball last season, had 11.
Smith stitched the operation back together, didn’t he?
That’s what great coaches do. But I can’t stop thinking about last spring and summer — when the coach was in a very different place. In addition to the NBA losses, WSU had TJ Bamba transfer to Villanova and watched DJ Rodman bolt to USC. Then, in August the Pac-12 imploded, leaving WSU facing a pile of uncertainty.
“You don’t want to be the bellyaching guy,” Smith told me on Sunday morning. “But you go through the spring and (TJ) Bamba tells me he’s going to stay, but he has an agent. He’s a good guy, but I told my assistants: ‘This isn’t going to end well for us.’ I knew. The reality is, when money gets involved, it’s about money.
“Are these players Millennials or Gen Z-ers? I don’t know what they are. They’re used to ordering sandwiches the way they want online. It’s a new world. I don’t like it, but I can’t change it necessarily.”