At the Washington Athletic Club over the weekend, Danny Sprinkle stood before a room full of former Sonics, Huskies, Chieftains and other basketball aficionados, and spoke realistically about his first season as the University of Washington basketball coach and optimistically about what comes next.
He wasn’t shy in detailing the biggest shortcoming for his 13-18 Huskies, who finished in last place in the Big Ten in his debut season — his guard play was underwhelming, particularly in having someone step forward to dictate the direction of the offense.
The coach hopes to rectify that with 6-foot-1 freshman JJ Mandaquit, a top 40 player from Hurricane, Utah, already on campus.
“He’s going to be phenomenal,” Sprinkle said at the annual Northwest Basketball Legends dinner. “If you saw any of our games last year, hopefully you wore a football helmet with the way we threw the ball all over the place, It will be great to have a true point guard.”
Referring to incoming 6-foot-10 German forward Hannes Steinbach, he called him one of the top two or three basketball prospects in all of Europe.
Sprinkle next described 6-foot-3 guard Courtland Muldrew from Springdale, Arkansas, as a top 80 guard who has had nearly all of the SEC feverishly trying to recruit him, including his home state University of Arkansas.
“Trust me, [John] Calipari and Arkansas have been trying to get him out of his letter of intent and thrown a bunch of money at him all year to try and get him,” the Husky coach said.
He told how Muldrew was determined to leave the South to play his college basketball elsewhere and Sprinkle mentioned how he would like to introduce the guard to Eddie Miles, the former Seattle U All-America player and NBA veteran who hails from Little Rock, Arkansas, to help facilitate his arrival in the city.
Sprinkle was pleased that, even with his last-place team, the Alaska Airlines Arena crowds for the Huskies’ Big Ten games were large and loud, though he said there were still too many visiting team fans on hand that need to be replaced by locals.
He said the new basketball facility under construction adjoining the arena will pull the UW out of the bottom in comparison to what the rest of the Big Ten teams have to offer.
The talent level is increasing, according to the recruiting experts, with the Huskies finding themselves in some top 10 rankings.
“We have one of the top classes in the country coming in,” Sprinkle said. “I want to give my assistants a lot of credit for that. They busted their butt.”
However, two players ended their commitments to the Huskies, and Sprinkle said he and 6-foot-10 forward Niko Bundalo, a 4-star recruit from Ohio who played high school ball this past season in California, mutually agreed to part ways for personal reasons.
After three weeks, Bundalo has not yet been picked up by another school.
In regards to 6-foot-8 forward Dominique Diomande, a Frenchman who joined the Huskies at midseason, redshirted and transferred to BYU, the coach said the player received a much more generous NIL deal than the UW was willing to offer him.
Diomande came to the Huskies at midseason because that was the earliest the school could enroll him and he never appeared in a game.
Sprinkle still has two of a newly mandated 15 scholarships left to offer, which is two more than last season.
While he couldn’t comment on any player possibilities, the coach recently was seen in a photo posted on social media meeting with 6-foot-11, 220-pound Christian Nitu, a Florida State transfer, Canadian native and someone who seems likely to end up in Montlake.
Sprinkle also said that Quincy Pondexter, the former UW player and assistant coach who spent last season at USC, is rejoining the program as a full-fledged assistant, not as a special assistant as the school erroneously mentioned in a release.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
Quincy Pondexter Returns to the Huskies as Assistant Coach
Huskies Get in Early, Offer Miami Forward from Class of 2028
Meet JJ Mandaquit, a Player Already with NBA Connections
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