The Horns host the Hornets in the team’s first game since winning the Legends Classic last week.
After beating the Syracuse Orange and the Saint Joseph’s Hawks last week at the Barclays Center to win the Legends Classic, the Texas Longhorns are back at the Moody Center on Friday with the Delaware State Hornets in town.
Tip is at 8 p.m. Central on SEC Network.
It’s the final tuneup for Texas before traveling to Raleigh to face North Carolina State in the SEC-ACC Challenge and hosting No. 2 UConn next Sunday in the most important week of the non-conference schedule for head coach Rodney Terry’s team.
As the Longhorns work to improve in multiple areas, one of the most important tasks is getting star freshman guard Tre Johnson back into a better rhythm. After Johnson started his collegiate career making strong decisions on the ball and playing within the flow of the game, his overall decision making regressed in Brooklyn and so did his efficiency as a result — the Garland product only turned the ball over five times in the first four games before giving it away eight times in the Legends Classic and went 11-of-36 shooting, including 2-of-13 shooting from three-point range.
Too many of those shots were forced as Johnson lost his composure at times, but he did finish both games strong, making all six of his free-throw attempts in the final minute of the 70-66 win over Syracuse to break open a tie game and scoring six points over a two-minute stretch late in the 67-58 victory over Saint Joseph’s.
Terry would also like to get more out of junior guard Jordan Pope, who has a 14-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio through six games, but has only scored in double digits twice — a 10-point performance against Mississippi Valley State and an 11-point performance against Houston Christian. Pope is struggling in particular with his three-point shooting, hitting just 26.1 percent from three after converting at better than 37 percent in both of his first two seasons.
After averaging 17.6 points per game for an Oregon State that went 13-19 and finished last in the Pac-12, Pope was always going to take on a smaller role for Texas — and, indeed, he’s playing about 11 fewer minutes per game so far this season — but to get through the more difficult portions of the non-conference schedule and SEC play, Pope needs to be more efficient and carry a larger scoring role.
Delaware State arrives in Austin with a 3-4 record and a No. 332 ranking in BartTorvik.com’s adjusted efficiency metric. The Hornets are a bad shooting team across the board and haven’t been much better defensively, struggling to get stops and giving up offensive rebounds at a high rate when they do actually force opponents to miss.
Texas has a win probability of 99 percent with a projected score of 87-56.