Is Houston guard Aubrey Coleman the best player you never heard of before this week? (Photo courtesy: Houston Chronicle)
SPOKANE, Wash.- When the Terps drew Conference USA Tournament champ Houston in an NCAA Tournament first-round game, it’d be understandable if you had never heard of Aubrey Coleman.
Even though his 25.6 points per game scoring average leads Division I, the senior largely flew under the radar thanks to his team’s inconsistent play. Then, Houston won four games in four days to seal up its first spot in the Big Dance since 1992.
By now, you might have done a little homework on the Cougar star.
Here are a few more essentials on the Houston scoring phenom to chew on as the week progresses:
- Just because Coleman is scoring doesn’t mean the Cougars, who are just 19-15 even with the four-game winning streak, are rolling. Coleman cracked the 30 point mark nine times this season. The Cougars dropped five of those games. He didn’t score more than 29 points in any of those four C-USA Tourney wins, and even though he struggled shooting in the title game, he had his most complete game of the season with 13 points, nine rebounds and six assists.
- Before now, the most publicity Coleman has received is probably for this incident, in which he stepped on former Arizona player Chase Budinger’s face last season. Coleman later apologized and received a one-game suspension.
- In a Tuesday media availability session, the Terps didn’t seem overly worried about Coleman, who guard Eric Hayes compared to Virginia Tech’s Malcolm Delaney for his pure scoring ability. Coach Gary Williams said the Terps will make sure to have an “extra pair of eyes on him” to cut down on his easy buckets, but their main goal is to make him work for his points. “I don’t know what his percentage is but I’m guessing it’s not 50 percent,” forward Landon Milbourne said of Coleman, who shoots 43 percent from the field. “He shoots a lot of shots, but we’re just going to try to contain as much and help as much—just play our defense. We’re not going out there trying to shut him down. Just play our defense.”
- Coleman has been doing this for a while. Although he took a circuitous route to play for his hometown Cougars, Coleman started producing right away when he joined the team as a junior college transfer last season. Coleman’s numbers aren’t that much improved this season, although his scoring is up almost six points per game. The 6-foot-4, 200-pounder’s rebound numbers are actually down from his first year as a Cougar. The major difference is his three-point shooting. After hitting just 21 percent of his trey attempts last season, he’s improved to almost 32 percent this season. That production is good enough that in their latest mock draft, www.nbadraft.net slots Coleman as a mid-second round pick in this June’s NBA Draft.
To their credit, none of the Terp seniors seemed too perplexed about Coleman in the minutes after the brackets were announced, and you can bet they’ve seen a lot of tape of him this week. But after a couple years of posting crazy numbers in obscurity, Coleman has a chance this weekend to make sure Terp fans don’t soon forget him.
Tomorrow, we’ll get a chance to hear from Coleman himself here in Spokane. Hopefully, I’ll have a few more nuggets to add to the Coleman file at that point.
Eric Detweiler is The Diamondback’s Terrapin Men’s Basketball Team beat writer. He can be reached at edetweilerdbk@gmail.com. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/edetweiler.