A lot has been made of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga's three-headed basketball monster of David Jean-Baptiste, Malachi Smith and Silvio De Sousa, and for good reason.
Jean-Baptiste is in his fifth season on the court for the Mocs and has 1,642 career points, Smith is in his second season at UTC and has 1,161 career points including his freshman year at Wright State, and former Kansas forward DeSousa has averaged 11.5 points, 6.5 rebounds and 1.2 blocks through 22 games with the program as a graduate transfer.
For UTC, though, this season will be defined by how players such as guard A.J. Caldwell and forwards Josh Ayeni, Darius Banks and Avery Diggs (and Grant Ledford, who has played well lately) filter in with key moments.
Last Saturday it was Banks, the 6-foot-6, 215-pounder who has 1,424 career points between his time at James Madison and UTC but had scored 20 points in a game just once this season. He stepped up with a season-high 26 in the team's biggest win yet, a 64-58 victory at Furman that put the Mocs squarely in the driver's seat for the Southern Conference regular-season title.
This team has time and time again walked into tough environments to get victories, and while the win at Furman stands above the rest, the Mocs (22-5, 12-2 SoCon) also have a league victory at Virginia Commonwealth University (another team among the nation's top 100) and 11 true road wins, tops in the country.
"A younger, less experienced team doesn't play in a fashion that allows them to win (on the road)," UTC coach Lamont Paris said after last weekend's victory against the Paladins. "They're going to try to get a 10-point shot in there, they're going to try to play hero ball at times. We've had none of that."
Paris joked recently about how he kept hearing about how the back end of the Mocs' schedule afforded a number of opportunities at McKenzie Arena. But living in the moment, it felt to him as if the Mocs were always on the road.
"You're on this bender of all these games and it's like, when is that going to happen?" Paris said recently. "You can't see the end of the tunnel."
But the time has finally arrived, and not only will the Mocs finish the regular season with three of their final four games at home, where they are 11-1 this season, they are on the cusp of something the program hasn't accomplished in six years.
Staff photo by Matt Hamilton / UTC mascot Scrappy urges the crowd to get loud during a Wofford free throw on Jan. 26 at McKenzie Arena.A lot of talk has surrounded how a win in Thursday's 7 p.m. game against UNC Greensboro (15-11, 7-7) will secure the top seed in next month's SoCon tournament in Asheville, North Carolina - and that's true. There's also the not insignificant prize that comes with the league's regular-season title: a guaranteed trip to the National Invitation Tournament if the Mocs don't win the league tourney.
But two wins means UTC won't share the regular-season crown with anyone else, by virtue of the season sweep of Furman giving the Mocs a three-game lead in the standings. They host VMI at 4 p.m. Saturday, visit East Tennessee State next Wednesday, then close the regular season with senior day against Samford on Feb. 26.
"We like our chances, where we are now," senior forward Darius Banks, who also grabbed nine rebounds at Furman, said after Saturday's win. "You can see today we played our butts off in that second half. We almost gave it up by some key offensive plays they made, but we still stuck in, handled adversity and we came down, got our stops and got a score."
Now, after so much time and work on the road, the team has a chance to be celebrated at home - to win a championship at home, although the bigger goals still lie ahead.
"We're on a mission. We've been on a mission, and today helped us in that," Paris said Saturday. "The challenge will be all that good stuff I've said about our approach, about our mentality, about what practice looks like on Monday - none of the basketball stuff, because you make shots, you miss shots, all those things. What are those things going to look like on Monday when we come out to practice? If we win one more game out of four, we clinch a share, and maybe that's what you're playing for, but that's not going to be our mentality. I'm not those guys; they're going to be the ones that have to do it.
"But it's nice to have the luxury to know how close we are to a title, but we're only going to entertain that for a couple of seconds."
Contact Gene Henley at ghenley@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @genehenley3.