Utah guard Terrence Brown chasing history in regular season finale vs. Baylor

Terrence Brown sits one basket away from doing something no Utah men's basketball player has ever achieved before.

A made field goal — or two free throws — during Saturday's regular season finale against Baylor (3 p.m. MT, Peacock) would give the 6-foot-3 guard 600 points on the season, putting Brown in rare company as he closes out his first season with the Runnin' Utes.

Brown has been the engine of Utah's offense throughout the season. Despite being at the top of every opposing team's scouting report, he paces the Utes in several categories, including points, assists, steals, field goals made and free throws, and ranks as one of the Big 12's best scorers with 19.9 points per game.

Not many players at the high-major level mean as much to their team as Brown does to Utah, and even fewer have reached the 600-point threshold. As of Thursday, there were 11 such players from a power conference: BYU's AJ Dybantsa, Duke's Cameron Boozer, Kansas State's P.J. Haggerty, Arkansas' Darius Acuff Jr., Northwestern's Nick Martineli, Mississippi State's Josh Hubbard, Wake Forest's Juke Harris, Stanford's Ebuka Okorie, Indiana's Lamar Wilkerson, Alabama's Labaron Philon Jr. and Wisconsin's Nick Boyd.

Scoring 600 points in a season is no small achievement. But doing so as a high-major's lead floor general? An even tougher feat to pull off.

Of the 11 players from a power conference with 600 or more points on the season, only six have done so while leading their team in assists. Brown, currently sitting on 598 points and 112 assists, would join Boozer, Acuff, Hubbard, Okorie, Philon and Boyd on that short list with a single basket on Saturday (Iowa's Bennett Stirtz has an opportunity to join that list on Thursday during the Hawkeyes' showdown with Michigan, and could soon be joined by Ohio State's Bruce Thornton by the end of the Buckeyes' tilt with Indiana on Saturday).

Brown is also ever-so close to becoming the first Utes player since 1984 (when assists became a recognized NCAA stat) to finish a season with over 600 points and 100 assists, and is on the verge of being the 15th player in program history to reach the 600-point benchmark in a season.

The Minneapolis native has essentially been on this trajectory since dropping 36 points in his second game in Utah threads. Brown followed up his performance against Weber State with four more 20-point outbursts in a row, setting the tone for how he'd attack the rest of the Utes' nonleague schedule.

It wasn't as easygoing for Brown once the rest of the Big 12 had enough tape on him to put together centralized game plans. There was a five-game stretch in the beginning of February where Utah's engine was being held to 40% shooting from the field, 12.2 points on average and committing 2.8 turnovers per game. He also went 0-for-13 from 3 in those five games, underscoring the difficulty he faced while going up against a few of the league's best defensive teams in Kansas, Houston and Cincinnati.

It's been a smoother ride for Brown as of late, though his ability to impact the game in other ways has been just as noticeable as his scoring touch. Since the start of February, he's dishing out 3.4 assists, grabbing 3.6 rebounds per game and getting more involved defensively. For context, he averaged 3.9 assists and 2 rebounds in the first 21 games of the season.

Despite that brief drop off in scoring, Brown is still in position to etch his name in another part of Utah's history book as one of the few players in program history to average 20 points for a season. Bogut and Van Horn are the only Utes do pull off that feat since 1997.

For Brown, he'd have to score at least 22 points against the Bears on Saturday to finish the regular season with a 20-point average. Depending on how many games the Utes play in the Big 12 tournament, he'd have to average 20 points in the postseason as well to join Bogut and Van Horn in that rare company.

Going into Saturday, Brown is No. 4 in the Big 12 in scoring at 19.9 points per game. He's also averaging 3.7 assists, 2.5 rebounds and 1.4 steals while shooting 45.3% from the field, 33% from 3 and 76.7% from the free-throw line.