Pac-12 preview: WSU

This is the twelfth in an annual 12-part series previewing the Pac-12 teams for the upcoming season.

by Joe Veyera

After a first-round WNIT exit at the hands of Eastern Washington in March, it was a given that the Washington State Cougars would be forced to replace a pair of program cornerstones in guard Tia Presley and forward Shalie Dheensaw.

While the loss of Presley would certainly hurt, there was no shortage of underclassman talent at the guard spot. And the team had already gotten a taste of life without Dheensaw, after a knee injury early in Pac-12 play sidelined her for the remainder of the season, with freshman Louise Brown holding her own in her place.

Ultimately, after a 17-16 season, anything seemed possible for 2015-16 with Lia Galdeira leading the charge.

That is, until early July.

While the losses of Presley and Dheensaw to graduation were expected from the start, Galdeira’s announcement that she too would not return despite a year of eligibility remaining as well came as nothing short of a shock.

Suddenly, a team that likely could have contended for a post-season berth on the back of one of the best scorers in school history now appears more likely to be a middling competitor in a tough conference.

Now it’s up to head coach June Daugherty, now in her ninth season at the helm, to make the most of a roster that has nine underclassmen, and will need several of them to contribute to have any shot at extended its post-season streak to three years.

The biggest question Daugherty will have to address is how to replace the 45 of the team’s 68 points a night last season between Presley, Dheensaw, and Galdeira.

Senior guard Dawnyelle Awa and forward Mariah Cooks will be counted on to provide a steadying hand as the lone returners to start all 32 games last season, while sophomore forward Louise Brown will try to build off her success in 16 starts after Dheensaw’s season-ending knee injury.

Awa was second on the team last year in field goal percentage at 44 percent, and led the team in 3-point shooting. However, she only averaged about five points a night, and she’ll have to take on a more substantial role as a scorer for the team to have success. Senior guard Taylor Edmondson will also get more minutes, and be relied upon as another sharp-shooter as a player that makes approximately a third of her 3-point attempts.

The team’s fourth (and final) senior, guard Alexis Williamson, saw her playing time diminish to just four minutes a night in 2014-15, and with an influx of guard talent, it’s unclear whether she’ll get much time off the bench.

Sophomore Caila Haley was ranked as one of the top-20 guard prospects in the nation coming out of high school by ESPN, and stands to take on a more substantial role after averaging seven minutes a night last year, while fellow sophomore Pinelopi Pavlopoulou will try to build off a freshman campaign that saw her appear in all 32 games.

Australian guard Krystle McKenzie is coming off of a redshirt season, while the program adds freshman Alexys Swedlund, who was named Miss Basketball South Dakota 2015, the state’s highest honor for high school girls players.

Alongside the duo of Brown and Cooks in the post — one of the better pairings in the Pac-12 — the Cougars have relatively untested depth in junior forward Ivana Kmetovska, sophomore center Bianca Blanaru, freshmen Maria Kostourkova and Borislava Hristova, and redshirt freshman Nike McClure.

Kmetovska has seen limited playing time over the last two seasons, while Blanaru, a member of the U-20 Romanian National Team in 2013, averaged six minutes a night last year. McClure was one of the top high school players to come out of Washington State in 2014, and likely benefited from the season on the bench.

Kostourkova and Hristova are unknown quantities on the collegiate level, but both have U20 national team experience with Portugal and Bulgaria, respectively.

As a whole, it’s hard to truly know what the floor or ceiling is for the Cougars in 2015-16. A strong recruiter overseas, Daugherty certainly has a talented roster filled with national team members, along with a few highly-regarded domestic underclassmen like Haley, Swedlund, and McClure. The team’s success will rely heavily on how much those young players develop over the course of the year, and whether the question marks that currently fill the Washington State bench become solutions for this year and beyond.