ABILENE – The Abilene Christian men's basketball team last week climbed back to the .500 mark with a pair of non-conference wins and will look to keep its momentum rolling against two of the Lone Star's top teams in Incarnate Word and Texas A&M-Kingsville.
The Cardinals (9-5, 5-1 LSC) have won their last five to move into second place in the conference, while the Javelinas (8-5, 4-2 LSC) – winners of three straight – start their week in third place. The Wildcats, meanwhile, sit tied for ninth place with Angelo State at 1-5, but are only one game out of sixth place.
The ACU and UIW game will be broadcast live locally on KSLI 1280-AM and on the World Wide Web via the ACU Sports page at SkyboxLive.com.
Tuesday's game also doubles as Academic Honors Night, during which 150 ACU student-athletes will be recognized during halftime for posting a 3.0 GPA or higher for the fall 2012 semester. University President Dr. Phil Schubert is expected to be on hand to congratulate the student-athletes along with representatives from the Abilene Teachers Federal Credit Union, which sponsors ACU's student-athlete of the month award.
The Wildcats last week scored two of it largest wins of the season, first beating Arlington Baptist, 87-42, and then Southwestern Adventist, 83-48, on Saturday night. ACU averaged 85.0 points per game in its two games on .626 shooting (16-28, .571 from 3-point range) and pulled down 42.5 rebounds per game to go along with 38 assists, five blocks and 22 steals.
ACU's 20 assists Saturday vs. the Knights were a season best.
Individually, senior center
Steven Werner had a strong week in averaging 16.5 points and 8.5 rebounds coming off the bench and each night was just a few rebounds shy of a double-double.
Senior guard
Eric Lawton – the LSC's second-leading scorer (17.0 ppg) behind UIW's Dionelle Rucker (18.0 ppg) – also played well and extended his double-figures scoring streak to eight games with 11 vs. Arlington Baptist and 13 vs. the Knights. His nine assists and three steals vs. the Patriots served as career highs.
Additional performances of note from last week belonged to freshmen guards
T.J. Brown and
Parker Wentz. Brown recorded the first double-double of his career vs. the Patriots, coming off the bench to score 11 points and pull down 12 boards. Wentz scored a career high 21 points vs. Arlington Baptist on 5-6 shooting from 3-point range (7-8 overall), and on Saturday posted career highs in rebounds (5) and assists (5).
Incarnate Word is second in the league in scoring offense with 75.3 points per game, but No. 1 with a .495 field goal percentage and 16.1 assists per game led by the likes of Rucker, senior Lyn'Dale Brown (4.5 apg) and freshman Mitchell Badillo (3.8 apg). Brown, Rucker and freshman Kyle Hittle are all shooting above .500 from the floor this season as well.
The Cardinal defense is forcing close to 16.0 turnovers per game with Denzel Livingston (2.2 spg), Brown (2.2) and Rucker (1.9) all ranked among the LSC's top five in steals.
Kingsville has the league's second best defense with the Javelinas surrendering just under 60 points per contest at 59.3 ppg. They also rank first in the LSC and third nationally in field goal percentage defense (.372) and block an average of 3.4 shots per game.
Richard Basey leads the Kingsville offense with 15.2 points, 3.9 assists and 1.9 steals per game. Adam Mughmaw is their top rebounder with 5.7 per game.
