WSU vs. Washington basketball: Preview, TV schedule and game thread II

Do you want a preview, or do you want to take this opportunity to revel in a rare win for this team that just so happened to come against its in-state rivals? The second one, of course.

When Washington State visits Washington on Friday night, it will be going for a season sweep. The Cougs failed in their first and only other attempt to sweep a team (Utah) and they probably won't succeed tonight, so let's go ahead and talk about how the Cougs took out UW on the first day of February instead.

And hey, playing a team on the first and last day of a month. That is pretty wild, right? How often does that happen? Let's just assume "not very often."

WSU's 72-67 win over Washington on Feb. 1 was particularly interesting because it was leading scorer DaVonte Lacy's first game back. Lacy didn't exactly light the world on fire (and good thing because that sounds really unsafe and may result in jail time anyway). The junior scored 10 points and grabbed five boards and had one awesome obscene gesture after a second-half three. Not a bad day, but far less than we've come to expect from Lacy.

The real star against UW was senior big man D.J. Shelton, who ravaged UW weak frontline for 20 points and 18 rebounds. There is good news for Shelton in Friday night's game: UW's bigs still aren't good.

Perhaps the most unusual thing about WSU's win was it's ability to take care of the basketball. The Cougs turned it over just five times, or on eight percent of possessions. That's well below WSU's rate overall during league play, where it has given it away almost 20 percent of the time.

It's not out of the realm of possibility that WSU could repeat that turnover performance because a Pac-12 promo for this game said it's for bragging rights (meaning both teams are bad) and anything can happen!

Something that is out of the realm of possibility? I won't be at the ballet this time around. I was able to catch most of the first half last time, but missed the second half as I attended "Sleeping Beauty" performed by a cast of traveling Russians with no words and the only way I had any idea what was going on was that I've seen the Disney movie and there was a program (which was hard to read with the lights down). I also had some beer and free champagne.

My favorite character was the dude dressed up as the evil witch. He killed it. Way to go, man. Hopefully your performance was good enough to carry WSU to two wins over Washington.