A smaller-than-usual Hawaii basketball postseason banquet still managed to produce some memorable moments on Wednesday night at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Coral Ballroom. There was a silent auction, a recent staple at the UH preseason and postseason hoops fundraisers. There was pretty much the entire 2017-18 team in house, minus departed center Ido Flaisher, who still found a way to dominate the team’s season highlight video (perhaps the biggest upset of the night). And there was, for the first time […]
Hawaii basketball has a shooter for its 2018 class. City College of San Francisco guard Eddie Stansberry has committed to play for the Rainbow Warriors next season, he told the Star-Advertiser today. Stansberry hit 104 3-pointers his recently completed sophomore season at CCSF, at a 42.8 percent clip for the CCCAA champions, who went 33-1. That’s volume and efficiency, both. It was a pretty drastic improvement from his freshman season, when she shot 30 percent from long range. His scoring […]
Hawaii basketball coach Eran Ganot would like to further quell the speculation about his status for the vacant head hoops job at the University of San Diego. In the story that ran (free link) in Tuesday’s print edition of the Star-Advertiser, Ganot affirmed his loyalty to UH and downplayed a report that named him and four others as possible candidates for the Toreros job. But the question of whether he applied for it was left out there, hanging. Tuesday night, […]
The University of San Diego had a sudden opening for head men’s basketball head coach when Lamont Smith resigned earlier this month, about 10 days after his very public arrest at the Oakland airport for a domestic abuse allegation. USD, of the West Coast Conference, continued play without Smith (led by elevated assistant Sam Scholl) and reached the quarterfinals of the CollegeInsider.com postseason Tournament, losing to Northern Colorado to finish the season 20-14 (9-9 WCC). The rumor mill has already […]
Hawaii basketball’s first departure of the offseason was one of the rare after-season, mid-semester variety. In the days after UH returned from its season-ending loss to UC Irvine in the Big West tournament, center Ido Flaisher made a sudden departure back to his homeland of Israel to begin a three-year term in the Israeli army. Here’s a free link to the story that ran in today’s print edition. Israel has mandatory military service once its citizens reach age 18. There […]
Every so often, a basketball game like Thursday night comes around that reminds you to really, really cherish the good times. Hawaii’s 68-67 defeat at the hands of UC Irvine was a gut-wrenching affair that saw the Rainbow Warriors control the first 36 minutes — and then crash and burn in the last four. A combination of poor shot selection, forced and unforced turnovers and UC Irvine’s moxie undid the ‘Bows in season-ending fashion. If you play those last four minutes […]
UC Irvine was considered perhaps the toughest first-round draw possible — for anybody, but particularly Hawaii — in the 2018 Big West tournament. As luck had it, Irvine lost to UC Davis in double-overtime in their regular-season finale, swinging the season title to the Aggies and knocking the Anteaters down to third, and into a quarterfinal matchup with the sixth-place Rainbow Warriors. The Anteaters (16-16) defend at an elite level. Hawaii (17-12) generally defends well, but not nearly as consistently […]
Thanks to a little research, what was suspected since Saturday was confirmed: Hawaii did something that is pretty rare. The Rainbow Warriors, in beating and losing to every other team in the same conference season, became the first team in program history to do that (WAC or Big West), as well as the only team in NCAA Division I to go 1-1 against its entire league in 2017-18. (Note that not every conference plays a true double round-robin schedule like […]
