Washington will not bring back men’s basketball coach Mike Hopkins after this season, the program announced Friday.
Hopkins, 54, is in his seventh season as Huskies coach. He will coach the Huskies in the Pac-12 tournament and any subsequent postseason games, according to reports.
Washington is 118-105 overall with a 62-72 record in conference play under Hopkins. Washington finished the regular season 17-14 overall and 9-11 in the Pac-12 this year, including a 74-68 win at Washington State in the regular-season finale Thursday.
The Huskies made one NCAA Tournament appearance under Hopkins, in 2018-19, while winning the conference’s regular-season title. But they’ve had a losing conference record in four of the last five seasons.
Entering the 2023-24 season, the Huskies faced significant chemistry issues, with only 48.5 percent of their scoring returning. They added eight new players during the offseason — six transfers and two freshmen. Wesley Yates, Washington’s top-ranked freshman, has missed the entire season due to injuries.
Hopkins had one year remaining on his contract and will reportedly be owed $3.1 million.
Washington is set to move to the Big Ten next season.
Why the Huskies made this decision
It all started so promising for Hopkins, who decided he didn’t want to wait around at Syracuse as the eventual heir to Jim Boeheim. In his first season in Seattle, the Huskies won 21 games. The next year, they went 27-9 and won the Pac-12 title. Hopkins’ teams overwhelmed people early on with the 2-3 zone imported straight from upstate New York, and he had future pros like Isaiah Stewart, Mattsse Thybulle and Jaden McDaniels to work with.
But almost just as suddenly, things stopped working. UW went 15-17 despite having two first-round draft picks in 2019-20, and 5-21 in the following, COVID-19 shortened season, before hovering around .500 in Hopkins’ final three seasons. — Brian Bennett, senior editor
What went wrong for Hopkins?
Start first with that zone, which is now out of vogue in modern college basketball, as teams have learned to spread the floor with shooters. Washington’s defense ranked 18th nationally in 2018-19 and 31st the following year, per KenPom. From there? 134th, 103rd, 75th and, so far this year, 98th.
Throw in the re-emergence of UCLA and Arizona, both of whom had uncharacteristic downturns when Hopkins arrived, and the Huskies could no longer compete against the top of the Pac-12, much less nationally. And now they’ll need a coach to take them into what figures to be a brutally challenging, supersized Big Ten. — Bennett
Required reading
(Photo: Chris Coduto / Getty Images)
