Seattle is a tough team to figure. They’ve beaten some good teams, such as Stanford and Idaho State. On the other hand, they are 0-2 against the Big West, losing to Cal Poly (by only 2) in Seattle and losing to UCSB (by only 3) in the championship game of the Resort World Classic tournament. This will only be their second true away game, but the other one was their defeat of the Cardinal in Palo Alto. The head coach is Chris Victor who in his 5th year there has been a real victor with 3 consecutive 20+ win seasons prior to last year, when the team finished 14-18. He has some key players returning from what was then a young squad so they should be much improved and in fact have already won over half as many games as they won all last season. Seattle is favored by 3.5.

The Red Hawks best player is guard Brayden Maldonado who leads the team in scoring (17.7 ppg) but also rebounds, dishes assists and plays solid defense. Plus, he is shooting free throws at 97%. Another key player is Will Heimbrodt out of San Anselmo. He’s a 6’ 7” forward who scores at the rate of 14.9 ppg and pulls down 41 rpg. On defense, he’s a rim protector, averaging 2.8 bpg. The rest of the front court consists of Gonzaga transfer Junseok Yeo, a 6’8” forward (12.7 ppg, 3.8 rpg) and center Austin Maurer whose 7’ frame gives the Hawks an average size of 6’9” when he gets in the game. He leads the team in rebounds with 4. 3 per game. The point guard is Maleek Arington. The fifth starter is Houran Dan a 6’ 10” center from China, who gets a lot less playing time than many of the bench players. Some of the backups have good stats that were inflated due to the amount of playing time they got in a 115-60 route of Warner Pacific on Saturday. Still there are three players who have gotten a significant amount of playing time this year, guards Jojo Murphy, Miles Amos and John Christophilis. Interesting that they have three players from Asia: Dan, Seo (South Korea) and Yuto Kawashima from Japan.