By JOSH NEWMAN
College basketball doesn’t kick off for another three months, but Markelle Fultz already has Washington fans excited.
The Huskies freshman point guard continued his strong play on the team’s foreign tour to Australia and New Zealand, scoring a team-high 23 points on 9-for-14 shooting to go along with eight rebounds and five assists in a 92-79 win Sunday morning over the Mainland Eagles in New Zealand.
Fultz, the MVP of the FIBA Americas U18 Championship last month, has led Washington in scoring each of the first three games, and is averaging 24.7 points, 6.0 rebounds and 4.3 assists.
The 6-foot-5 McDonald’s All-American started the trip off with a bang by scoring 33 points to go along with seven assists on Wednesday against the Dandenong Rangers.
Fultz is the projected No. 1 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft according to DraftExpress, which released its first 2017 mock draft on July 31. He is one of eight projected one-and-done picks in the top 10.
Washington will play the Sydney University Lions on Sunday and the Sydney Comets on Wednesday before heading home on Thursday. The Huskies open the regular-season on Nov. 13 against Yale at on-campus Alaska Airlines Arena in Seattle.
Josh Hart leads Villanova
The senior guard scored 27 points and hauled in 13 rebounds to lead the national champion Wildcats to an 87-80 win over a Spanish Select Team in Madrid.
Villanova is 2-0 on its three-game trip, with the third game to be played Tuesday morning in Madrid.
“I have to attribute that to my teammates finding me in a position to score,” Hart said in a statement. “Then, it’s a matter of me being aggressive to feed off of their playmaking. In the second quarter we were able to get some stops and that got our offense going.”
“Josh was dominant, by far the best player on the floor today,” Villanova head coach Jay Wright said. “If that was a regular-season game, he probably could have had 40. We were trying some different things late, but when we needed a bucket, we went to him every time and he came through.”
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