The biggest question for Steve Lappas and the Massachusetts men’s basketball coaching staff heading into Friday night’s season opener with the University of Arkansas-Little Rock was who would replace Monty Mack and his scoring prowess.
Mack, the second leading scorer in UMass history, graduated last May and took his 19.5 points per game from last season with him. If the Minutemen were to be successful on Friday night and the rest of the season they would need somebody to pick up the slack at the offensive end.
Micah Brand was that man on Friday night.
He dropped 23 points on the Trojans, matching a career high, en route to leading UMass to a 66-60 victory. Brand scored the Maroon and White’s first eight points and made 11 of 14 field goals, many of which were 14-foot jumpers from the high post.
“We wanted to make Brand hit that shot, and he did,” UALR coach Porter Moser said. “He showed why I think he’s going to be a premier player in the Atlantic 10.”
“They flat-out dared him to shoot the ball,” Lappas added.
In coach Lappas’ new motion offense, Brand should be seeing quite a bit of the ball in the high post and he will likely take more than the seven shots per game that he averaged last season. Last year Brand would often disappear at the offensive end of the floor if he struggled in the early going and that is why it was so important for him to start off so hot on Friday.
“I saw how they were playing off me and I just took the shot,” he said. “It gave me a lot of confidence [to make the first one,] it was big.”
It took more than five minutes for somebody other than big No. 40 to get on the scoresheet for the Minutemen but, because of Brand’s hot hand, UMass was able to stay close to the Trojans, never trailing by more than four until the final seconds of the first half.
“They were worried so much about our low-post size and strength they were sloughing off and not worrying about the high post,” Brand said. “Coach Lappas said if we’re open and they play off us that much, shoot the ball.”
Despite making all four of his field goal attempts in the first four minutes of the game, Brand was reluctant to keep taking the open shot and took just three more attempts the rest of the half, much to the chagrin of his coach.
“He wouldn’t shoot the ball every time,” Lappas said. “So I told the rest of the guys to throw two or three passes away from the post area and then throw it in that way he’ll feel comfortable to shoot the ball. We were trying to trick him into feeling better about shooting it.”
The trickery seemed to work as the junior power forward added another 10 points in the second half as UMass erased a seven point halftime deficit to comeback for the six point victory. Brand put up another seven shots in the second stanza, making five including three from outside the paint.
“I do it a lot in practice,” Brand said of his offensive outburst. “But I’m not used to taking that many shots in a game.”
In the end the Minutemen are lucky that Brand did take each and every one of those 14 shots, as they probably would not have been in a position to make their comeback had he not.
“We did what we could to try and contain him,” Nick Zachary, UALR’s leading scorer with 17 points on the night said. “But he, and the whole team, made championship plays.”
Now the only question for Lappas and his staff is, can he do it for the remainder of the year?
