Braylon Mullins made his debut for UConn with a 10-minute cameo last Friday, played 23 minutes on Tuesday and will be out to contribute again when the No. 5 Huskies host East Texas A&M on Friday at Storrs, Conn.
Mullins missed UConn’s first six games before coming off the bench last week as the Huskies (7-1) earned a 74-61 victory over then-No. 13 Illinois. He came off the bench again on Tuesday in a 61-56 road victory over Kansas and finished with 17 points in 23 minutes.
“To miss six weeks with the type of injury he had, to the knee and to the ankle, and this to be his second college game — a game we were down — he sparked us,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “This was the first step for him, and he’s obviously going to make our team a lot better moving forward.”
Mullins was 6-of-12 shooting and made three of the Huskies’ seven 3-pointers.
“The first four minutes I was in, until that media timeout, the nerves were going,” Mullins said. “But as the game went on, you just kind of play basketball. At the end of the day, it’s a child’s game.”
Solo Ball also had 17 points for UConn while Alex Karaban added 11, including the go-ahead basket with 10:47 left and a layup with just under two minutes remaining to give the Huskies a 59-54 lead.
UConn’s Tarris Reed sat out again with a recurring ankle injury after he returned to play 15 minutes against Illinois. Reed remains day-to-day with the injury he sustained against BYU on Nov. 15.
“It’s the way he came out of the (Illinois) game, just how he was feeling, the way he felt the last couple of days,” Hurley said. “Tarris has got to get himself healthy and he’s gotta get on the court.”
East Texas A&M (4-3) is playing its third straight game in the Northeast after earning victories against Farleigh Dickinson and Army before Thanksgiving at the FDU Basketball Classic in Hackensack, N.J.
Gianni Hunt scored 18 points on 7-of-10 shooting against Fairleigh Dickinson and finished with 10 in the 84-67 win over Army. He shot 10-of-16 in the event and earned Southland Conference Player of the Week Honors.
The Lions are led by Ronnie Harrison’s 14.0 points per game on 55.1% shooting and Damian Garcia’s 10.9 points. Garcia the way with 20 points in the victory over Army.
“It was great,” Lions coach Jaret Von Rosenberg said. “We get performances from different guys.”
East Texas A&M is one victory away from matching its win total from last season when it went 5-26.
“It’ll be a little different opponent than we saw these last two games, but I really want to see us carry over stuff that’s been successful in these games,” Von Rosenberg said.
Von Rosenberg is making a return to Connecticut after he was a former assistant at Hartford, where he played in the backcourt for the school from 2006-09.
