Getty VCU forwards Marcus Santos-Silva and Issac Vann.
The UMass Minutemen basketball team will host the VCU Rams in Atlantic 10 play on Wednesday.
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The game (7 p.m. ET start time) will be televised locally on MASN and NESN+, but if you don’t have those channels, anyone in the U.S can watch VCU vs UMass live on ESPN+:
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VCU vs UMass Preview
The Rams suffered a fourth consecutive defeat on Friday, falling to the Saint Louis Billikens 80-62 on the road to slip to 17-10 on the season and 7-7 in conference play.
“I’m not sitting around crying,” VCU head coach Mike Rhoades said, according to WRIC. “I’m not sitting around complaining. I’m not sitting around making excuses because that continues to get you beat.”
Big man Marcus Santos-Silva led VCU with 11 points and 6 rebounds, adding a game-high 3 blocks.
Guard Marcus Evans, who last year led the team in scoring, recorded just a single point after missing the team’s previous two games with an ailing knee. He’s missed his last 10 field-goal attempts across three contests.
Evans suffered a knee injury late in the 2018-19 season. He’s averaging 23.8 minutes per game this year after logging 26.8 per contest a season go.
“We need to get him better. He’s been trying. He’s been rehabbing to get back on the court for each game,” Rhoades said of Evans, per WRIC. “But then in the game it’s just he’s having trouble pushing off. He’s having trouble changing direction.”
The Minutemen’s last five games have been decided by single-digit deficits. They’ve won three of those, including the last two.
On Saturday, they bested the Fordham Rams 57-49 on the road to improve to 12-15 overall and 6-8 in A-10 play. UMass went on a 20-8 run in the second half to take a 52-42 lead with three-and-a-half minutes left.
“We got off to a good start, we got up 4-0, and I felt like our effort dipped a little bit after that,” Minutemen head coach Matt McCall said, according to The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. “That’s all we kept talking about during timeouts: this is a grind. I called it psychological warfare all week, and you can’t get distracted at any point in time. There’s going to be a run in the second half that’s going to win us this game, and that’s exactly what happened.”
UMass center Tre Mitchell led all participants with 15 points and 19 rebounds, though he shot just 5-of-21 from the field. Forward Samba Diallo came up with a game-high 3 steals to go with 14 points and 8 rebounds. Guard Carl Pierre added 13 points and 4 boards.
“It was everybody,” McCall said, per The Massachusetts Daily Collegian. “I thought Samba Diallo today was terrific, he goes for 14 [points] and eight [rebounds], the steal and the dunk that he had was a huge play. Got Carl going there early, got him some looks, there’s a couple he missed that I’m sure he wants back but he also made some which was big for us, especially when we were struggling so much offensively in the first half.”