Pac-10 Tournament breakdown

It’s Pac-10 Tournament time again, the tournament tips off at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, when the California Golden Bears take on the Oregon State Beavers.

And unlike conference play and the NCAA Tournament, when teams play one or two games per weekend, the Pac-10 Tournament is like a typical high school state tournament. Teams play on three or four consecutive days to be crowned champion.

“That is a lot of games in a lot of days,” WSU head coach Tony Bennett said. “So whether you distribute the minutes a little equally, I don’t know, but whatever game you’re in, it’s tournament basketball. You play that thing to win it – if you gotta play guys 48 minutes like we did or 45. I think you have to do what gives [you] the best chance to win and not worry about saving guys. Not at this point in the year.” The Cougars played three straight days to open their season in November. The athletes acknowledged they will probably get tired, but they aren’t too worried, either.

“I don’t think [fatigue] will be too much of a factor for us,” center Aron Baynes said. “Guys are gonna get slow, but as you’ve seen, we’ve got a lot of depth and it’s been coming into its own the last few games as we’ve had guys step up and have big games when it’s been needed.” The Cougars enter the tournament as the No. 2 seed and await the winner of seventh-seeded Washington and 10th-seeded Arizona State.

Anything can happen in a tournament like this. Oregon and Stanford found UCLA fallible during the course of the season. The Bruins also lost to UW on Saturday, proving how competitive the conference is.

“It just shows who can beat anybody any night, so we’ll definitely have to be ready for whoever we play,”WSU guard Kyle Weaver said.

The Pac-10 is currently the No. 3 RPI conference among the 32 Division I conferences in the country, and was No. 1 for several weeks. RPI is a mathematical representation of a team’s relative strength of schedule and winning percentage.