Syracuse’s Onetime Heir Apparent Jolts a Struggling Washington

John Locher/Associated Press

SEATTLE — The University of Washington men’s basketball coach threw a punch. Then another.

Mike Hopkins wasn’t making contact. He was shadow boxing. Typically multitasking, he was also telling a hyperkinetic story.

It was about his days as a boxer in the early 1990s. But it was also about why Washington had lost so painfully to Oregon days earlier in its final regular-season game. Even his story was doing two things at once.

The story Hopkins was telling took place during his undergraduate days at Syracuse, when he played guard for the longtime coach Jim Boeheim, whom he ended up serving as an assistant for 22 seasons. For a while back then, Hopkins also trained in…