UTEP hosts North Texas tonight at the Don Haskins Center
UTEP men’s basketball team returns to the Don Haskins Center this week for the final two games of the regular season.
The Miners host North Texas at 7 p.m. today and Rice on Saturday (2 p.m.). UTEP is tied for third place in the C-USA standings with Old Dominion and Western Kentucky, and can wrap up a bye in next week’s Conference USA Tournament with a pair of victories.
“We hope to finish it up strong,” UTEP coach Tim Floyd said. “We would have loved to win the Louisiana Tech game and we didn’t get it done. I put coach [Phil] Johnson in a very difficult situation on Saturday and it didn’t work out. We’re going to be a better team as a result of this.
“We’re going to come back home and hopefully have a great week and finish this thing where we need to be. I know this much, had we won at Louisiana Tech and Southern Miss, there would be a banner hanging up there for Conference USA [champions]. That’s great. But at the end of the day, we probably would not have been in the NCAA Tournament. We’re going to have to win the tournament anyway. That’s what this week is about, trying to play a little better.”
The Mean Green had a five-game winning streak snapped against Old Dominion on Saturday in Denton.
North Texas brings a 3-8 road mark to El Paso, including 3-4 in league play. The Mean Green won its last two C-USA road games at Florida Atlantic on Feb. 19 (79-72) and FIU on Feb. 21 (70-56).
“North Texas has won five of their last six,” Floyd said. “They are a completely different team than we saw early. They didn’t play one second of man-to-man defense against us, but now they are a man-to-man team. And they are playing it very well. I really like what they’re doing offensively sharing the ball. They’re getting a lot of post-ups that they didn’t get early in the year and they’re doing some nice things.”
UTEP closes out its conference schedule with the two teams that it opened against for the first time since the 2002-03 season.
The Miners won at North Texas (85-71) on Jan. 2 and at Rice (66-57) on Jan. 4. Twelve years ago, UTEP opened its WAC slate by losing to Hawaii (64-52) and beating San Jose State (80-68) in the Haskins Center; the Miners ended the regular season by falling at San Jose State (74-73 in OT) and Hawaii (77-63).
The Miners would win a tiebreaker over Old Dominion and lose a tiebreaker to WKU. UAB, which sits a game ahead of UTEP in the standings and in second place, is on the road this weekend at Florida Atlantic Thursday and FIU Saturday. So with 16 of 18 league games in the books, much is yet to be settled.
Thursday is Military Night and Saturday is Senior Day for C.J. Cooper, Cedrick Lang and Julian Washburn.
