By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Big Monday was not a fun day for West Virginia University.
Playing as uninspired a game of basketball as they have in some time, the Mountaineers turned their return to the top five of the national rankings into a stinker, laying an 82-75 egg against Villanova before a national ESPN audience and 15,593 fans, none of whom so much as dared throw a nickel on the court.
Earlier in the day the Mountaineers had reached No. 5 in the AP poll and No. 4 in the Coaches poll, Villanova being a mirror image in the rankings after being thumped over the weekend by Georgetown.
You wouldn’t have known this was two teams that figure to contend for the Big East crown and the national championship. Villanova kept turning the ball over and committing fouls, and West Virginia kept saying thank you, but no thank you, taking advantage of almost nothing.
The Mountaineers managed somehow to turn 32 free throws in 18 points, and if you do the math you find out they left 14 free points out on the court in a game they lost by seven.
But this wasn’t so much a matter of losing the free throw shooting contest, one Villanova won by hitting a magnificent 19 of 22, including 10 in a row by Scottie Reynolds when the Wildcats needed it most.
This was a matter of losing the game of emotion.
Playing before the building’s third largest crowd ever, West Virginia approached it like a trip to the dentist’s office.
“We didn’t match their intensity,” guard Truck Bryant said. “That’s terrible. When you are at home you are supposed to have the intensity.”
It would be simple to place the blame on new restraints put on the student section after their ridiculous performance in the Pitt game, but to a man the Mountaineer players and Coach Bob Huggins said that had absolutely zero bearing on the performance.
The fans, in fact, were into the game, perhaps not to the level they are when they are at their insulting best, but it just could not ignite the emotional wick in the Mountaineers.
The truth is, that right from the start the Mountaineers were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
If they’d been chucking hand grenades instead of basketballs at the basket, it wouldn’t have been so much as scratched, so far off were the West Virginia shooters.
The most uncharacteristic performance came from the man most likely to carry the Mountaineers, much as he has done all year — Da’Sean Butler.
A year ago in the Coliseum Butler went off for 43 points against Villanova in as powerful a one-man show as the building has seen since Bob Dylan played the building.
This year, with Villanova running some junk defenses and playing in his face much of the time, he managed to go 2 for 12 from the floor and 2 for 9 from three-point range. He played all 40 minutes made only two baskets and 13 points, seven of them from the free throw line.
“I didn’t do a good job,” Butler admitted. “I usually lead by example. I did nothing.”
He wasn’t upset about not coming near matching the 43-point performance of a year ago.
“I could not care less if I score two points if we could win the game,” he said.
But that was not to be on this night.
As usual, they came out and played miserably, falling behind by 11 at the half as Villanova shredded whatever defense they tried, hitting an amazing 63.3 percent from the floor.
“We’re almost used to falling behind by 11,” guard Joe Mazzulla admitted.
But this time it was to a Villanova team that some believe can win a national title, with players like Scottie Reynolds and Corey Fisher and Corey Stokes, a team that has firepower and emotion and the world’s best dressed coach in Jay Wright.
What Wright wears doesn’t really matter, but it makes for good reading.
No defense really worked.
“They’re good when they are able to step behind ball screens and make shots,” Huggins said. “We tried to use our length to make it hard for them but we didn’t do a very good job. The two guys we tell them to stay down on were 17 for 20 from the foul line.”
Still, in the second half, somehow the Mountaineers cut into the lead at 62-59 in the middle of the second half when Devon Ebanks hit a one-handed slam. By this time they had inserted Casey Mitchell, perhaps the most disappointing Mountaineer this year, into the game and he lit the joint up with 3s, scoring 12 points in nine minutes, but in the end it couldn’t happen against this team.
“We can’t expect Da’ to get 30 points every game and carry us,” Huggins said. “Our other guys have to do things. When they’re chasing him around and giving him that much attention, how do we not get a rebound? We got outrebounded by eight and that hasn’t happened all year and they play four guards.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
