UTEP men’s basketball looks to get back on track
UTEP men’s basketball looks to get back on track
In the search for hope for a UTEP men’s basketball team still looking for its first victory against a Division I team, there’s this: The Miners’ best game this year was their last one, the road loss at 7-2 Seattle, where they were tied with 3:00 to play against a team comparable to the top of Conference USA.
That followed two lackluster games at a tournament in Jacksonville, which came after that miraculous overtime escape against Division III St. Thomas, so at this point any good news needs to be accepted.
UTEP is off to 9-2 Hawaii now with a three-game losing streak and a 3-5 mark, and per the NET ratings the NCAA uses as its metric, the Miners are the 12th and last team CUSA (worth noting: Seattle would be second in CUSA in those rankings).
The Miners were eighth in the preseason CUSA poll with no all-conference selections and they have work to do at this point to live up to that.
How does UTEP fix its slow start
So what has gone wrong, and more to the point, what can get fixed righted?
“It’s obviously rebounding, we have to get better rebounding, we have to have better offensive execution,” coach Joe Golding said. “We’ve got to continue to figure it out offensively, and I think we are figuring it out. Defensively, rebounding has been an Achilles heel. And we have to do a better job of guarding the ball without fouling.”
Where UTEP needs to start
Rebounding is where to start. UTEP has been beaten on second-chance points in four of its five losses to Division I opponents and for the year the Miners are -4.8 on the glass.
UTEP is undersized and the plan was to offset that with a big turnover advantage, but it is only +3.8 there and that hasn’t overcome the rebounding issues.
What did help against Seattle was going with a bigger lineup. UTEP’s 6-foot-6 forward Jamal West set season highs for minutes (36), points (21) and rebounds (14), while 6-8 forward Elijah Jones logged 25 minutes with 18 points. Trey Horton, a 6-5 guard who gives UTEP backcourt size, logged his first start and a season-high 26 minutes.
Against Seattle, UTEP was outrebounded 33-29, so closer than their season average, and lost second-chance points just 11-10. After the game was tied with 3:00 to go, Seattle won boards 5-2, accounting for most of their game-long advantage and pointing out the next step the Miners need to take.
The Miners aren’t going to suddenly start winning rebounding, that’s not who they are, but they can cut into their deficits there.
The other problem is offensive efficiency, and this isn’t entirely unexpected. UTEP has 10 new players and four returners and the pieces haven’t come together yet. That’s part of why there was so much encouragement in Seattle when the Miners did seem to take a step forward.
Their 47.4% shooting was a four-point improvement over what they came in with and much better than it had been against Division I teams. The 13 turnovers was also a slight improvement adjusting for the level of competition.
Defensively UTEP is rounding into the team Golding wants in terms of aggressively pressuring the ball and forcing turnovers. Opponents are shooting 44% and turning it over 16.5 times per game, which are winning numbers. Defense hasn’t been the problem, other than defensive rebounding, which is part of the bigger rebounding problem.
Has UTEP started to turn a corner?
“It was better,” Golding said. “We’re still trying to figure out how to win with this group. Our effort was better, offensively we started to figure out some things execution-wise, offensively we were better. We gave ourselves a chance against a very good team, we just didn’t execute down the stretch.”
What UTEP has to hope is that as a mostly new team learns itself, the offense will continue to trend upward. That offense still is looking for an identity, they are still learning to play together, but the Miners may have hit on something by feeding West inside.
UTEP won points in the paint against Seattle 36-26, one game after getting outscored 40-14 in the paint in the 75-59 loss to UAB that was the low of this season.
Stopping the losing streak in Hawaii will be difficult, but if UTEP can continue the trend it started in Seattle, it can bring some momentum into the WestStar Don Haskins Sun Bowl Invitational. Those are its last two games before conference begins on Dec. 29.
UTEP is going to need these next two and a half weeks to continue to grow. The Miners are a long ways from where they need to be, but they may have taken the first step.
Bret Bloomquist can be reached at [email protected]; @Bretbloomquist on X.
