Hans Gasser: Contributor?

Joe Wolfinger has a broken foot. Specer Hawes is getting scoped. Zach Johnson is no longer a college basketball player. While Hawes' injury looks to be minor, Wolfinger is likely done for the season. For the time being, this leaves only three healthy "Bigs" on the UW roster - Brockman, Artem Wallace and Hans Gasser. As the season starts, Hawes should be back, but he still will have missed 2-4 weeks of conditioning, and will take time to get up to speed. Wallace and Gasser will have to fill the void, and while Artem can be the big body thug that we need, Gasser and his jumper need to replace some of the missing offense.

Last year, Gasser did a decent job filling in minutes for the injured Mike Jensen in the non- conference games, scoring 6.3 points and grabbing 2.9 rebounds per game. Once Jensen got healthy, Gasser's playing time disappeared, and aside from two big threes against Oregon State, he scored only 4 points in all the rest of the Pac 10 games combined. This year, he needs to show he belongs on a Pac 10 team, give us some points off the bench, rebound the ball and not get dominated physically. If he can get 7 points and 4 bounds a game, I would consider that a successful year.