Providence Preview
January 12, 2011 03:56 PM | General
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – College basketball fans coming to the WVU Coliseum to see West Virginia play Providence on Thursday night will also get to watch one of the top scorers in the country.
He’s Marshon Brooks, a 6-foot-5, 200-pound senior guard, and he’s averaging nearly 24 points per game for the 11-6 Friars.
Brooks is coming off a 29-point performance at Rutgers – the 11th consecutive game he has scored more than 20 and the 13th time he’s done that this season. Only three times against Dartmouth (13), Yale (15) and Wyoming (10) Brooks has failed to score at least 20 this year.
“He scores a lot of ways,” said West Virginia coach Bob Huggins. “He’s their second leading offensive rebounder and actually has 40-something offensive rebounds (43) and he’s only five behind their center. He scores off the bounce, he’s their best 3-point shooter; he’s just a really good player.”
Brooks has really blown up this year after averaging a much more ordinary 14.2 points per game as a junior in 2010. Six times he topped the 20-point mark that year and he scored 13 in last year’s loss to West Virginia in Providence.
“He’s put a lot of time in and a lot of time in during the offseason,” said Huggins. “We have two guys in our league … (Connecticut’s) Kemba Walker went from being a good player to being a great player. It’s pretty well-documented the time that (Brooks) put in during the offseason.”
Containing Brooks is not Huggins’ only concern.
“They’re going to press pretty much the whole game in a couple of different ways and we have to attack their pressure,” Huggins said. “They’re going to throw a couple of different zones at us and we’re going to have to attack their zones.”
Guard Vincent Council is more than just a complimentary player, averaging 15.2 points per game and handing out a team-high 115 assists. He scored a career-high 29 earlier this year against Wyoming and has reached double figures in all four Big East games this season.
Gerald Coleman, also a guard, is averaging double figures at 10.6 points per game.
Providence starts a pair of 6-9 forwards, freshman Kadeem Batts from Powder Springs, Ga., and sophomore Bilal Dixon from Jersey City, N.J. The two are combining to average 13.7 points and 13.2 rebounds per game.
The Friars are 0-4 in Big East play, but three of those losses to Syracuse, St. John’s and Pitt have come by margins of 7, 2 and 4 points respectively.
“Everybody in this league is capable,” Huggins explained. “If you look around the league Connecticut beat South Florida in overtime at Connecticut and South Florida hadn’t won a game yet in the league. This is a league where I think probably more than at any other time since I’ve been here everybody’s capable of beating anybody.”
Huggins can look no further than his own team to back up that statement. West Virginia went into the Verizon Center last Saturday and knocked off 13th-ranked Georgetown, 65-59, behind Casey Mitchell’s 28 points. Mitchell has scored double figures in each of his last five games after a rough two-game spell in early December when he scored just 6 against Robert Morris and 2 against Duquesne.
“Casey is very capable of scoring the ball,” Huggins said. “I think he had four 3s (against Georgetown), so he did a lot of different things. That’s the way Casey played earlier in the year and then he, for whatever reason, just kind of hovered around the 3-point line and wasn’t very active. He’s got to be active to be a good player.”
Huggins was also pleased with the activity his team displayed on the defensive end of the floor against the Hoyas, forcing them to turn the ball over on four of their final five possessions of the game.
“We worked really hard on being able to make the correct rotations,” Huggins said. “I thought our rotations were a whole lot better and we rebounded the ball better. We didn’t give the second shots that we have been giving. When you continue to give people more opportunities, the chances are a lot higher that they’re going to score.”
Huggins is hopeful the Georgetown performance will translate in continued success.
“Every day is a new day,” he said. “Some days we’re pretty good at it and some days we aren’t very good. I thought we had really good emotion and some bounce in our step. There’s so much to be said for playing with enthusiasm and playing with some emotion and I thought we did that.”
Mitchell (17.6 ppg.), Kevin Jones (13.6 ppg.) and Truck Bryant (12.3 ppg.) continue to lead the Mountaineers in scoring. Bryant had a career-high 25 in the loss at Marquette, but has scored just 9 each in his last two games against DePaul and Georgetown.
“He has to make better decisions,” said Huggins of Bryant’s recent play. “I think a lot of guys that play the way Truck played in high school are that way. You have to know whether you can get it at the rim or you can’t. So many times you take one dribble too many and when you do that you just get swallowed up by size.
“When you continually get swallowed up by arms and legs, you can’t score and you can’t pass it out of there. You have to make your decisions a lot quicker,” he added.
West Virginia (10-4, 2-2) has won nine out of its last 10 against Providence, the lone loss during this stretch coming in Providence on Feb. 20, 2007. The Friars are 1-8 all-time at the Coliseum with that victory coming back in 1999.
Tip off for Thursday night’s game is set for 7 p.m. ESPN2 (Mike Patrick and Len Elmore) will televise the contest nationally.
MSN’s coverage (Tony Caridi, Jay Jacobs and Kyle Wiggs) begins with the Coliseum Countdown at 6:30 p.m. Satellite radio listeners can access the broadcast on Sirius channel 91.
Tickets still remain and can be purchased online through WVUGAME.com.
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