It didn’t take long for the mood to shift in Seattle.
The despair brought on by a season in which Washington finished dead last in the Big Ten (13-18 overall) seemed to fade in the blink of an eye. By early June, a new, rather dangerous feeling was rising on the U-Dub campus: hope.
With a year under his belt, coach Danny Sprinkle had tweaked his offseason approach and built a roster that, if all goes as expected, should have the Huskies dancing for the first time since 2019.
“This group reminds me of all the groups I had at Montana State and the one group I had at Utah State,” Sprinkle tells Hoops HQ.
That should be music to the ears of Washington fans. During Sprinkle’s four years at Montana State, the Bobcats went 81-43 and won two Big Sky tournament championships. In one year at Utah State, he guided the Aggies to a Mountain West regular-season title and was named the league’s Coach of the Year.
After leading teams to the NCAA Tournament in three straight years, Sprinkle landed the job at Washington in March 2024. Despite some preseason buzz, the Huskies struggled immensely, stumbling to a dismal 4-16 record in their first run in the Big Ten. Five of those losses came by at least 20 points.
The jump from mid-major to Power Five was eye-opening for Sprinkle. As he reflected on what went wrong and shifted focus to the 2025-26 campaign, he knew a few things definitively. One, he needed considerably more talent to contend with the Big Ten’s powerhouses. Two, he needed more depth and athleticism to match the league’s physicality, as well as to protect against injuries. And three, he needed guys who were ultra-competitive and who lived in the gym, which wasn’t the case in 2024-25.
With four players graduating and seven transferring out, Sprinkle was tasked with a major rebuild. Fortunately, he had a larger NIL budget to work with than in 2024, when the program whiffed on several of its top targets due to a lack of money.
“Even if you have a great point guard, you have to go out and try to sign the best point guard you can get,” Sprinkle says. “You might have an NBA player at the four spot, you better go try to recruit another NBA player behind him, because that’s what teams are doing in this league. You look at the top teams, they have guys off the bench and sometimes not even playing very much who were McDonald’s All-Americans. So that was my approach this year: We have to upgrade the talent, the athleticism and the competitiveness in a major way.”
Check, check and check.
Washington added five promising freshmen, including consensus top-50 recruit J.J. Mandaquit, who Sprinkle sees as the best point guard in the 2025 class (he’s rated No. 6 in the 247Sports composite rankings), and German big man Hannes Steinbach, one of the top international prospects. Mandaquit stands just 6-foot-1, but he’s a tremendous floor general. He starred alongside BYU freshman A.J. Dybantsa at Utah Prep Academy and has won multiple gold medals with Team USA.
Steinbach, a 6-foot-8 forward, shined at the FIBA U19 World Cup in July, averaging 17.4 points and 13.0 rebounds (second in the tournament). He’s currently projected to be a first-round pick in the 2026 NBA Draft.
With assistant coach Andy Hill taking the lead, Washington recruited Steinbach for more than eight months before earning his commitment.
“Every time we’d call him, he’d be in the gym shooting,” says Sprinkle. ”He came on his visit and signed early, thank God. Everybody tried to jump in late. It was crazy what was happening.”
The staff also thrived in the portal, assembling a transfer class that Hoops HQ ranks eighth in the country. The headliners are former USC teammates Desmond Claude, a 6-foot-6 senior guard, and Wesley Yates III, a 6-foot-4 sophomore guard. Claude averaged 15.8 points, 4.2 assists and 3.5 rebounds for the Trojans, while Yates put up 14.1 points and shot 43.2 percent from behind the arc. Yates started his college career at Washington, redshirted, then transferred to USC. Now he’s back and figures to play a prominent role for Sprinkle, who prioritized adding shooters after the Huskies averaged just seven three-pointers per game last season, which ranked 259th nationally.
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“I thought we had some pretty good guards last year, but this year is different,” Sprinkle says. “Our quickness, our physicality, I think we have a chance to be a lot better defensively at the guard spots. And then our consistent shot-making.”
Claude exposed Washington’s lack of perimeter defense last season. In two matchups against the Huskies, he averaged 22.5 points (on 60 percent shooting) and 7.5 assists.
In addition to Claude and Yates, Washington signed 6-foot-1 senior guard Quimari Peterson, the reigning Southern Conference Player of the Year. Peterson averaged 19.5 points and knocked down 42.2 percent of his threes at East Tennessee State. With Mandaquit on board and 6-foot-4 sophomore guard Zoom Diallo returning, Washington went from decimated to loaded in the backcourt.
The frontcourt is similarly deep. Steinbach and returnee Franck Kepnang, a 6-foot-11 senior center, will be joined by a versatile group of transfers. Six-foot-10 sophomore center Lathan Sommerville is a powerful, bruising big who averaged 8.2 points at Rutgers, and 6-foot-8 senior forward Jacob Ognacevic, the 2024-25 A-Sun Player of the Year, can play both inside and out. Ognacevic averaged 20 points and 8 rebounds while shooting 40.2 percent from deep at Lipscomb.
Indiana transfer Bryson Tucker, a 6-foot-7 forward and former McDonald’s All-American, can fill multiple positions with his size and athleticism. And Florida State transfer Christian Nitu and Mady Traore, the No. 3-ranked JUCO prospect in the country according to 247Sports, bring tremendous height and length.
“We’re going to play like my team at Utah State, where we’re one of the top teams in the country in tempo and scoring, because we have the players to do that,” says Sprinkle. “I thought last year, just from a defensive (standpoint), we had to slow down the game and limit the possessions to keep ourselves in games. And a lot of that was because of our (lack of) depth, especially at the post spot. But this year we’re going to be able to play a lot faster and hopefully shoot and make a lot more threes. We have a lot more versatility.”
The challenge for Sprinkle is nailing down a rotation given his plethora of options. He anticipates using various combinations based on the matchup, including a few four-guard lineups and a “jumbo” lineup that can dominate the interior.
The staff has been especially encouraged by how competitive and committed the new group is.
“I don’t have to beg these guys to get in the gym,” Sprinkle says. “I don’t have to set shooting times to make sure they come in and get shots up. These guys are in the gym at 5 a.m., they’re in at 9 p.m. at night. They just live in the gym. I love it because we didn’t have that last year, to be honest with you.”
By now, last year feels like a lifetime ago for the Huskies.
