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Will Westhead style challenge Stanford women's supremacy?
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The addition of Paul Westhead's wacky brand of ball to the Pac-10 could eventually pose a threat to Stanford's dominance of Pac-10 women's basketball.
Or not. Tara VanDerveer and her talent base and incoming recruits should keep the Cardinal on top for the forseeable future, but Oregon is now worth discussing.
Westhead, Oregon's new coach, is one of two new Pac-10 women's coaches who have had success in the WNBA -- Michael Cooper at USC is the other -- but Westhead's hiring is the more intriguing, not only because he is 70 years old and has never coached women's college basketball, but because he brings a unique, wild style that has had varying degrees of success over the years.
His style is to press the entire game to step up the tempo, almost inviting the opponent to take layups in a hurry so his team can rush back downcourt and put up a three-pointer. When the opponent takes the ball out of bounds after Westhead's team scores, Westhead 's defenders typically play between the inbounds passer and any potential pass recipient. Teams have little choice but to throw over the top, and with an entire open court ahead, they are lured into taking a quick shot.
His Loyola Marymount men's teams of the late 1980s were the highest scoring teams in NCAADivision I history, and the style helped the Lions go from an obscure West Coast Conference team to a nationally ranked team that got as far as the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals.
However, the style did not work at all in the NBA when he coached the Denver Nuggests nor at George Mason University, where he coahced after being fired by the Nuggets.
But it did work in the WNBA. After two mediocre seasons, his Phoenix Mercury team won the WNBA title in 2007 and set an WNBA scoring record of 89.0 points a game in the process.
Now he is at Oregon, and there is no question that he will employ the same, half-crazed style with the Ducks. Kristi Fallin was not even on the recruiting radar of the previous Oregon coaching staff, but the junior-college standout was signed by Oregon last week ,because her school -- Umpqua Community College -- plays the uptempo style Westhead favors and because Fallin is an excellent three-point shooter.
The Ducks have a ways to go after finishing 5-13 in the Pac-10 last season, when they lost their final six games and 10 of their final 11. But they return virtually everyone, except Ellie Manou, the team's No. 3 scorer who opted to return to her native Australia.
There were unsubstantiated rumors that former Stanford star Katy Steding was interesting in becoming an Oregon assistant, but Westhead apparently has completed his staff without adding Steding.
It's safe to say, no Pac-10 team will play like the Ducks, and that alone will make them difficult to prepare for. And if Westhead can bring in players that fit his system, Oregon could pose a problem. At the very least they will cause headaches and some high-scoring games.
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