Forward Hannes Steinbach has been the Huskies best overall player this season.
The Washington Huskies men's basketball team has one more nonconference game left on its schedule before going full-tilt into Big Ten play.
The Huskies will play the Utah Utes at 8 p.m. PT on Dec. 29 at Alaska Airlines Arena in Seattle. Washington will enter that contest 8-4 overall and 1-1 in conference competition. The lone Big Ten win for the Dawgs was an 84-76 result against No. 24 USC on Dec. 6 and the loss was an 82-80 result against UCLA on Dec. 3.
The Huskies will begin Big Ten play with a gauntlet that includes four top-15 matchups in their first six conference games. Those contests are against No. 5 Purdue on the road Jan. 7; at home against No. 2 Michigan on Jan. 14; at home against No. 9 Michigan State on Jan. 17 and on the road against No. 13 Nebraska on Jan. 21.
If Washington can get through January with a winning record, the team can build a solid resume as it hopes to make its first NCAA Tournament since 2019.
If the Huskies do run the gauntlet successfully, freshman forward Hannes Steinbach will have a large part to due with it.
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The German big man, despite missing several games with an ankle sprain, has emerged as Washington's best player this season.
Steinbach, who's played in nine of the Huskies' 12 games, has averaged 17.9 points per game on a 59% clip from the field. He's also pulling in 12.1 rebounds per game and is averaging 2.3 assists and a block per contest.
Steinbach's impressive freshman season has started to garner him NBA Draft hype. Recently, he moved up to the 15th-best player available on CBS Sports' Big Board.
Adam Finkelstein discussed Steinbach's move up the board in a conversation with Kyle Boone and had a lot of praise for the German big man.
"This guy has been phenomenal coming back from the ankle injury," Finkelstein said. "He's putting up huge numbers, talking about (6-foot-11), with a, roughly, 7-foot-1 wingspan. He's got great hands and a strong body. One of the things I wrote after Players' Era was the amount of NBA executives who were emphasizing the need for NBA-ready bodies because of the increasing level of physicality in the NBA game. I think Steinbach fits that. He's got great hands, as I said, great touch. He is a phenomenal rebound of the basketball, specifically an offensive rebounder. I think he's got shooting potential. A quick look at his stats, he's shooting, like, 60% from (3-point range) but that's obviously on very low volume. One of the things that's intriguing to me about him, though — with the increased frequency of the double-big lineups that we're seeing both in college and in the NBA, I think that fits his game very well. If we're just playing with a single big, I'm not sure he gives you enough rim protection to play the five. But, he's got tremendous instincts playing pick-and-roll, he can slip out of it, he can short-roll, he can play-make because he's a good passes, he can do all kinds of different stuff."
Steinbach has scored in double-figures ever game this year and has yet to play a game where he's had less than six rebounds.
If Steinbach is drafted where he's projected on CBS Sports' Big Board, he'd be the highest-selected Washington player since center Isaiah Stewart II was picked 16th overall in the 2020 draft.
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