After one season, Mike Hopkins has Huskies ahead of schedule

Exactly one year after the University of Washington announced the hiring of its new men’s basketball coach, the Huskies ended their first season under Mike Hopkins much later than anyone would have expected when he landed the job.

UW fans might debate if the 2017-18 season was a success or a missed opportunity, but there’s no denying a once-proud program hit with six seasons of mediocrity is brimming with confidence entering what appears to be a promising future.

In many ways, Hopkins is ahead of schedule.

When he took over, Washington was akin to a burning house following a 9-22 season that included just two Pac-12 wins.

Athletic director Jennifer Cohen made the hard call and ended Lorenzo Romar’s 15-year tenure, which prompted most of UW’s pledged recruits to transfer while several Huskies, including star forward Noah Dickerson, considered leaving.

Once Hopkins secured a coaching staff, convinced most of the returning players to stay and salvaged the recruiting class, the first-time head coach could finally begin the most difficult task of all: building UW’s culture.

Before taking the Husky job, Hopkins, 48, was best known for being the right-hand man to Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim. For 22 years, Hopkins sat alongside the bespectacled master of the 2-3 zone defense while meticulously planning for the moment he would be in charge.

“I have a journal, and if I read something I write it down,” Hopkins said. “You dream of being a head coach for so many years. You ask yourself, ‘What would I implement?’ And you simplify it. It’s like cutting the fat off. You’re cutting it and cutting it, and when you go through the process, there’s a lot of time and effort to come up with something simple.

“But the simple is the art.”

During the first few weeks in his new city, Hopkins devised the tenets that would define the Huskies for as long as he remains in Seattle.

He bounced a few ideas off his wife Tricia, because “she’s got a great eye and ear for a lot of those things.”

Hopkins then huddled last summer with his newly formed staff of Will Conroy, Cameron Dollar and Dave Rice for a brainstorming session that refined the message.

More meetings included an audience with Focus 3, a leadership consulting firm, and UW administrators before addressing the players.

“We had to get that right before I could get in the gym with them,” Hopkins said. “You have an offensive system. You have a defensive system. But what’s your culture going to be?

“What was our mission going to be? Who are we going to be? It was a process of really defining what the most important things are going to be for us. And that laid the foundation for everything.”

The first of the 15 core values Hopkins likes to call “brain tattoos” began with “Tougher Together,” which is something he says multiple times at nearly every news conference.

The phrase has become synonymous with UW men’s basketball while appearing on tweets, T-shirts and marketing campaigns.

Hopkins believes the slogan is more than a Twitter hashtag.

“Tougher Together was something at the very beginning when we established the culture part,” he said. “That came about after asking in a perfect world, what can we be? Tougher Together is the fans. It’s our administration. It’s our team. The community.

“They say it takes a village; well, it takes a community. And that’s where part of that whole connected with the city and trying to have committed service and making a difference is something I’m looking forward to doing this summer.”

Regardless of the result, Hopkins doesn’t dwell too much on the past. Another of his favorite doctrines: Always Moving Forward.

The Huskies surpassed expectations and finished 21-13 — a 12-win improvement and their most wins since 2011-12 — in a season that ended with an 85-81 defeat at Saint Mary’s in the second round of the National Invitation Tournament.

Washington, picked to finish 10th in a Pac-12 preseason media poll, posted a 10-8 record in the conference and tied for sixth in the conference race. It was UW’s most Pac-12 wins since 2011-12.

“Not the way we wanted to end our season, but if I were to tell you last year that this was the season we would’ve had, most people woulda laughed at the idea,” guard David Crisp tweeted. “Man what a ride with an unbelievable group of men.”

By most accounts, Washington’s season was a success on and off the court.

Hopkins, who ranks third in wins among first-year UW coaches behind Tippy Dye (24-6, 1950-51) and Art McLarney (23-11, 1947-48), was voted the Pac-12 Coach of the Year.

Meanwhile, three UW players received all-conference honors, including Dickerson (first team All-Pac-12), Matisse Thybulle (Defensive Player of the Year) and Jaylen Nowell (All-Freshman team and All-Pac-12 honorable mention).

Washington averaged 8,309 fans at Alaska Airlines Arena for conference games, which ranked fifth in the Pac-12 and was the most since the 2012-13 season.

Only 5,883 came out to UW’s home opener to witness Hopkins’ Husky debut — an 86-82 win over Belmont on Nov. 10 — and fans initially were lukewarm on Washington.

A stunning, 74-65 upset win over then-No. 2 Kansas on Dec. 6 in Kansas City, Mo., UW’s biggest regular-season non-conference victory, put the Huskies on the national radar.

However, a disappointing 97-70 setback to cross-state rival Gonzaga days later in front of a sellout home crowd tempered enthusiasm.

Still, the Huskies posted a respectable 11-4 record in nonconference games.

Washington regained momentum and prematurely peaked with a captivating four-game winning streak that included a thrilling buzzer-beating victory against then-No. 9 Arizona.

At the time, the Huskies were 17-6 and tied for second in the Pac-12 at 7-3.

Washington finished 4-7 the rest of the way, including four losses by eight or fewer points to teams that didn’t qualify for the NCAA tournament.

The late-season collapse and a shoddy 5-9 record in neutral-site and road games are the main reasons the Huskies’ NCAA tournament drought was extended to seven years.

“We found out how we can win games,” Thybulle said. “We hung our hat on being a really good defensive team, but then we got away from the things that made us successful.”

Washington loses just two seniors — reserve guard Dan Kingma and walk-on forward Greg Bowman — and all five starters, the top 10 scorers and 11 players have eligibility, including sophomore guard Bitumba Baruti, who did not play this season.

The Huskies signed four-star shooting guard Jamal Bey, who was the Gatorade Player of the Year in Nevada, as well as three-star point guard Elijah Hardy, and three-star power forward Nate Roberts during the early signing period.

Washington also picked up verbal commitments from four-star center Bryan Penn-Johnson and three-star forward Ed Chang, who could reclassify for 2019.

Assuming the Huskies bring in a five-man recruiting class, they’ll need to restructure the roster to comply with the NCAA limit of 13 scholarship players.

For Hopkins, the first year with the Huskies was merely a preview of what’s to come.

If “Tougher Together” capsulized Year One, then the theme for his encore just might be “Prove It” or “Ready for Anything” or “One More.”

“The more I’m with these guys the more it’s becoming their message, and they’re living the foundation of what we want this program to become,” Hopkins said. “If someone were to say, ‘Tell me about UW basketball,’ then we’d say, ‘We’re Tougher Together.’

“‘We have a Multiple Effort Mentality and One More. We Own the Ball. We have Uncommon Preparation.’ These core beliefs, we fight for them every day. And as our culture becomes more and more ingrained into the everyday fabric of what we do, then that’s when you see real growth as a team, as basketball players, as college students and as young men.”