Utah seeks 20th win tonight in Wyoming

LARAMIE, Wyo. — With a key road victory under their belts, the Utah basketball team will try to extend its win streak to five and get win No. 20 when it plays Wyoming tonight (7 p.m. KJZZ-TV) at the Arena-Auditorium.

The Utes (19-5) appear to be as confident as they've been all season after building a double-digit lead against Colorado State in the first five minutes and holding on for an 80-70 victory Saturday night.

Still a game back of Air Force at 7-2 in the Mountain West Conference standings, the Utes need a victory tonight to keep pace heading into Saturday's important game with the Falcons at the Huntsman Center.

The Cowboys are struggling this year after contending for each of the first four MWC championships. They fell to 2-7 and 9-13 overall Saturday with a 67-53 loss to BYU

Wyoming is led by point guard Jay Straight, who is third in the league in scoring (16.0 ppg), but only managed five points in the loss to BYU. David Adams scores 10.3 points per game, while Mory Correa and Joe Ries each average 5.1 rebounds per game. The Cowboys were hurt earlier this month when Utah native Tim Henry, the starting off guard, abruptly quit the team.

Utah has won four straight since Kerry Rupp took over the reins of the team, but he says there is nothing out of the ordinary going on.

"We do the same things as always, try to defend and rebound," he said.

However, there is more to it than that. The Utes are executing better on offense and getting scoring from more sources.

The Utes have relied on the scoring of senior Nick Jacobson, freshman Andrew Bogut and sophomore Richard Chaney all season with Tim Frost contributing an occasional big game. But the sudden transformation of point guard Tim Drisdom from a playmaker into a scorer has made a huge difference in the Ute offense.

Over the first 20 games, Drisdom's best-scoring game was 10 points against Pepperdine. Over the last four games, all since coach Rick Majerus left the team, Drisdom has scored 14, 8, 14 and 24 points, the latter a career-high against Colorado State.

Drsidom acknowledges that he's looking to score more, saying, "the coaches are encouraging me to be more aggressive." But he is also trying to be humble about it, saying he "happened to fall into a lot of things" during the CSU game.