104-47: Final score of the first game. Sure, it was Willamette, but 50+ point wins are nice.

As far as the team goes, they look so much better. For one thing, we went from being incredibly short compared to the other teams last year, to actually being pretty tall. If we needed to, you could probably put Lenz, Loveridge, and Bachynski (or Washburn instead of Lenz...but...it's Washburn), and have a ridiculously tall, strong, good shooting front line. And they can shoot. Oh, boy, can they shoot. They shot 63% from the floor, and hit 8/18 from behind the arc.

Individually, Loveridge is clearly the leader. He beefed up after high school quite a bit, and is good at moving down low, but can shoot from anywhere on the floor. I think he was 2/3 from 3-point range. I'm not sure he's quite a dominant player, as he didn't seem to be able to score at will, but then they never needed him to.

Dakarai Tucker shone through much of the game, hitting some great threes and had one nice dunk.

Glen Dean, the new point guard, is quick and has a great shot.

Washburn even looked improved from last year. He didn't have those 5ish minutes where he looked great like he usually did last year, but he also didn't loaf around the other 35 minutes, so overall he played much better.

Bachynski will be great, though he needs to learn a few little fundamentals-type things. He reminds me of Enes Kanter last year on the Jazz.

Obviously it's hard to draw much from this game, since it was against a non-D-I team, but the team looked much, much improved over last year. I think next year, with all of their stars into their second year, they could end up in the tournament. This year, I guess it's possible, but we won't know until we see them play a real team. For now, we'll have to feel good about beating a team by a greater margin than they scored points. That's always pretty great.