Nevada Basketball: Wolf Pack adds TCU to non-conference schedule

The Nevada Wolf Pack have added a much-needed boost to their 2017-2018 non-conference schedule.

Per Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports’, the Wolf Pack will face off against the TCU Horned Frogs on Friday December 8^th at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

The game will be a part of a triple header at the Staples Center that will include St. John’s going up against Arizona State and Oklahoma squaring off against USC. This will be Nevada’s first time playing at Staples which is home to the Los Angeles Lakers, the Los Angeles Kings and the Los Angeles Clippers.

The Wolf Pack’s opponent, the TCU Horned Frogs, are coming off a 24-15 (6-12 Big 12 conference record) record in 2016 and won the NIT tournament in Jaime Dixon’s first season in Fort Worth. With five starters returning from last season team, the Horned Frogs look to be a potential top-25 team.

Nevada has been looking to bolster their non-conference schedule for this upcoming season. Their schedule includes games against Illinois State, UC Davis, Pacific, Hawaii and UC Irvine to name a few. The Wolf Pack had to cancel a home date with North Carolina A &T so the addition of TCU to the non-conference schedule is a big boost to the profile of the Wolf Pack’s non-conference schedule as they look to return to the NCAA tournament this up-coming season.

Nevada can potentially schedule up to 32 regular season games and of those 32 games, 14 of those can be non-conference games since Nevada has exemptions for the neutral site tournament and the Hawaii road game the Wolf Pack will participate in this season. Wolf Pack head coach Eric Musselman is continuing to build Nevada’s non-conference schedule this season for a possible return to the postseason.

“We still have four games to try and put together on our schedule”, Musselman said back in May after the announcement of his five-year contract extension by the school. “The first year was pretty easy to schedule games. The second year was a little more challenging. This year has been overly challenging. We’re trying to put together the best possible schedule to put ourselves in contention from an NCAA standpoint.”

The opportunity to play TCU and the possibility of defeating them could go a long way to strengthen Nevada’s non-conference profile and lift the profile of the Mountain West conference on the college basketball landscape. This match-up should be a very entertaining game in the early portion of the college basketball season.