Pepperdine University’s men’s basketball team is preparing for two upcoming games as the regular season nears its end. The Waves, currently holding a 6-19 overall record and 1-11 in West Coast Conference (WCC) play, will travel to face Saint Mary’s on Wednesday at 7 p.m., followed by a home game against Loyola Marymount University (LMU) on Saturday at 2 p.m.
In their most recent game, Pepperdine lost to Pacific with a score of 92-59. Aaron Clark led the team with 17 points, making three out of five attempts from beyond the arc. Javon Cooley contributed 15 points and five rebounds, while Styles Phipps added seven points, six rebounds, and three assists. The team matched its season-high with six blocked shots during the contest.
Aaron Clark has been a consistent scorer for Pepperdine, recording at least 17 points in five of his last six games and averaging 19.2 points per game over that period. He has scored more than 25 points in four games this season and ranks ninth in the WCC with an average of 1.4 steals per game.
Styles Phipps stands out as one of only four players nationally who are averaging over 13 points, six rebounds, and 4.5 assists per game. He is fourth in the conference for assists per game at 4.7 and leads all WCC players in free throws made during conference play with a total of 71 successful attempts out of 87. Phipps also averages 6.1 rebounds per game.
Danilo Dozic has reached double figures in scoring thirteen times this season and leads Pepperdine in three-pointers made with forty-two successful shots from long range.
Javon Cooley ranks sixth in the conference for free throw percentage at .850 and has scored fifteen or more points nine times this year.
The Waves are notable within the WCC as the only team to have four players—Clark, Cooley, Phipps, and Dozic—averaging eleven or more points per game each this season.
Looking ahead to their opponents, Saint Mary’s enters Wednesday’s matchup with a strong record of twenty-one wins and four losses overall (10-2 WCC). The Gaels are currently third place in the conference standings after recent victories over San Diego and San Francisco. They lead Division I basketball nationally in free throw percentage (.814) and rank twelfth for scoring defense by allowing just under sixty-five points per game on average.
Saint Mary’s top performers include Paulius Murauskas (18.8 ppg), who is second among all WCC scorers, while Andrew McKeever leads the league with an average of nearly ten rebounds per contest.
On Saturday, Pepperdine will host LMU (13-13 overall; 4-9 WCC), which recently secured back-to-back wins against San Francisco and San Diego. LMU features one of the highest-scoring offenses within the conference at seventy-seven-and-a-half points per game.
Historically, Saint Mary’s holds an eighty-three to seventy-three advantage over Pepperdine in head-to-head matchups; they have won ten straight meetings between these teams since February 2021 when Pepperdine last defeated them in Malibu.
Against LMU, however, Pepperdine leads their all-time series by one hundred five wins to seventy-six but has not beaten LMU at home since January twenty-sixth two thousand twenty.
Following these games, Pepperdine will go on a two-game road trip next week to face Portland on February eighteenth before playing Oregon State on February twenty-first.
Pepperdine men’s basketball program has participated thirteen times in NCAA postseason tournaments and won twelve regular-season WCC championships along with three tournament titles throughout its history.
