Week 8 of the college basketball polls have been released and Providence moved in both polls, though they moved in different directions. The Friars won their only game on the schedule last week at UMass and it was in blowout fashion. Kris Dunn returned to the lineup after missing 2.5 games with illness and Ben Bentil had a career-high 32 points to go with 12 rebounds for his 3rd double-double of the season. Bentil was named Big East Player of the Week for that performance against the Minutemen. This is the first time Providence has been ranked in the AP Poll for 5 straight weeks since the 2003-04 season when the Friars spent the final 8 weeks ranked in the AP Top 25. The Friars dropped a couple spots to 12th in the AP Poll and slid up one spot to 13th in the USA Today Coaches’ Poll this week.
Ben Bentil has been on the Big East Weekly Honor Roll twice this season, but he has now moved up the list and was named Big East Player of the Week on Monday. Bentil had a career-high 32 points in Providence’s lone game last week at UMass. The Providence sophomore also had 12 rebounds, marking his 3rd double-double of the season. Bentil is currently leading the league in scoring (18.8 points/game) and is 6th in rebounding (8.0 rebounds/game). He is having a breakout season alongside Kris Dunn and is arguably as big a reason for Providence’s 12-1 start and top 10 national ranking as Dunn at this point in the season. Bentil winning this award snaps a 3 week streak of Butler players taking home the weekly honor.
This is the first RPI update post of the season and it will now be a weekly update. Once the season progresses this will return to the daily post that I began doing a season ago.
Freshman sharpshooter Ryan Fazekas started the first 9 games of his career at Providence before missing the Friars’ December 9th contest against Boston College due to a bout of mononucleosis. The Indiana native had been back at home recovering with his family for the last two weeks or so and Kevin McNamara of the Providence Journal reported on Twitter that Ed Cooley will again be without Fazekas for Providence’s Big East opener on December 31st at Butler.
As another calendar year comes to a close, the 2015-16 basketball season is about to heat up and I wanted to take an opportunity to wish all my loyal readers and rabid Friar fans a Merry Christmas. This has been a banner year for pcbb1917.com. Overall site views are up over 70% from 2014’s total and December 2015 is already the most-viewed month in the site’s history — the first time the site has been viewed over 50,000 times in a month! Over 127,000 unique visitors have made their way to pcbb1917.com in 2015. That’s pretty awesome.
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