MORGANTOWN — Through four years and nearly 2,000 points, Da’Sean Butler’s game has been dissected and analyzed until there is almost nothing left to say about it.
Yet, it seems, with each passing day it begs for more for there is always something new, something different.
He is Superman, yet so human, a basketball player so good that was named to the All-Big East first team on Sunday, a day after he hit his fourth game-winning shot of the year to beat Villanova.
It’s the kind of stuff that can inflate an ego, maybe even draw comparisons to one Jerry West, who simply was the greatest man ever to put his WVU pants on one leg at a time.
But it’s when you so much as try to make any comparison it is when you see why Butler has been able to do what he has done.
“I’m not trying to be Jerry,” he says.
And that explains it all.
No pretenses. No warped self adulation. Jerry West is Jerry West and Da’Sean Butler is Da’Sean Butler.
He accepts what he is and tries to lift it to its highest level, but isn’t chasing ghosts of basketball past, only his own future.
When Bob Huggins talks about Butler you sense something far more than a coach and player relationship. You sense that Huggins likes Butler as he would like his own son, that he respects and appreciates not only Butler’s acceptance of him as a coach but how that made it so much easier for Huggins to come into the job without any resistance.
You may recall when John Beilein arrived, he having a far different reputation than Huggins, he wound up running quite a few players off, including his best player, Drew Schifino, so that he could build what he wanted to build.
Huggins, on the other hand, did not have to do that because he had in Butler a person to lead everyone into coming together rather than falling apart.
Huggins, too, appreciates that Butler hits the books as he hits the boards and that he is priorities than range far beyond the basketball court.
“He’s a guy who will ride 45 minutes to read books to grade school kids,” Huggins noted.
What it all says, what it all means is that Butler is not only a first-team All-Big East performer, but he is a Big East Hall of Fame person, someone with an easy laugh yet a fire within him that seldom lets him fail.
He’s not necessarily a great athlete, if you were to compare him to, say, Joe Alexander.
But he succeeds far better than many who are looked at with more hops and more speed and more physical strength. Butler succeeds because he has a different kind of strength, as his 17.2 scoring average and 6.2 rebounding average attest.
“If they don’t see me as the best athlete, I can’t do anything about it except go out and play my game for myself, my school and the state,” he said.
“He’s probably as complete a player as there has been at this school, other than Jerry,” Huggins said.
A year ago he was a second team All-Big East performer. This year it’s first team, joining Notre Dame’s Luke Harangody, Georgetown’s Greg Monroe, South Florida’s Dominique Jones, Syracuse’s Wes Johnson and Villanova’s Scottie Reynolds.
Butler’s teammate, Devin Ebanks, was a third team choice for all league with Connecticut’s Jerome Dyson and Kemba Walker, Louisville’s Samardo Samuels and Villanova’s Corey Fisher.
The second team was made up of Georgetown’s Austin Freeman, Marquette’s Lazar Hayward, Pitt’s Ashton Gibbs, Seton Hall’s Jeremy Hazell and Syracuse’s Andy Rautins.
The All-Rookie team included no Mountaineers. It is led by Cincinnati’s Lance Stephenson, Connecticut’s Alex Oriakhi, Syracuse’s Brandon Triche, Providence’s Vincent Coucil, Rutgers’ Dane Miller and Villanova’s Maalik Wayns.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
