Before the season began, someone with a Big Ten website predicted the University of Washington basketball team would finish dead last in the conference.

At the time, it seemed like an uninformed if not overly harsh decision, considering the Danny Sprinkle-coached Huskies would be built around 6-foot-8 power forward Great Osobor, the reigning Mountain West Player of the Year from his time spent at Utah State.

This week, Andy Katz — a college basketball insider as plugged in as anyone across the NCAA landscape and affiliated with the Big Ten Network — put the UW at No. 17 in his latest conference power rankings, or next to last behind Minnesota.

His was not a wildly detached forecast. This previous weekend, Katz personally was in attendance at Alaska Airlines Arena for the Huskies’ humiliating 85-61 loss to USC, witnessing every last missed shot, errant pass and white flag of surrender raised.

What he saw was a newly put together yet surprisingly passive UW team (7-3 overall, 0-2 Big Ten) built mostly on transfers that likely won’t be headed for the NCAA Tournament, that will be just a stopgap giving Sprinkle time to bring in all of those highly rated players he just signed out of the high school and junior college ranks for next year.

Meantime, the coach felt the need to get tough with his guys for the following game against Eastern Washington, and an 87-69 victory with better energy resulted.

“Getting our butts kicked on Saturday — they had no choice,” Sprinkle said of the turnaround from the USC outing. “I told them if they’e not playing hard, they won’t play; I don’t care if we play five guys the whole game. That should be non-negotiable.”

Clearly these Huskies haven’t caught on with the local populace having played in six lightly attended home games. Local basketball fans basically don’t know who these guys are and haven’t found anything to pique their interest to come out and learn more.

Osobor sounded like an intriguing player coming in, especially after his agent revealed that the big man would receive $2 million for this season in name, image and licensing proceeds. While he’s a stronger rebounder than most and can dunk in an explosive manner, he is extremely limited as an offensive player.

As the NBA scouts willl take note, he doesn’t finish well. He doesn’t offer a mid-range jumper much, which is an absolute must to make the move to the next level.