MORGANTOWN — A year ago, the Big East was stronger and West Virginia University’s men’s basketball team was weaker.
If one analyzes that statement, one realizes the reason why the Mountaineers eagerly await the start of the 2009-10 season, a season that begins unlike few others in West Virginia basketball history.
To begin with, the Mountaineers are a Top 10 team, and that in and of itself is as rare as a rainy day in Saudi Arabia.
“It’s only the third time since they’ve been putting the polls out, and that just blew my mind,” said coach Bob Huggins. “There’s a lot of basketball tradition at this school, but I guess most of it came before they started putting the polls out.”
Indeed there is a great basketball tradition, but there are no national championships and there are no Big East championships.
We mention both here because the Mountaineers and Villanova, which returns all its starters from a Final Four team, are the two top choices to win a Big East that many are saying is in a down year.
Of course, that’s like saying Albert Pujols is having a down year.
“We’re not what we were a year ago, but last year we were the best league in the history of college basketball,” Huggins said. “You can’t do that every year, but we have two teams in the Top 10. No league has more. Some top conferences don’t have any. This is a great league and it will continue to be a great league.”
Which means what?
“If you can win this league, you can win a national championship,” Huggins concluded.
And Huggins believes West Virginia can win the Big East.
His team has a whole lot going for it, not the least of which is the ugly memory of losing to Dayton in last year’s first round of the NCAA Tournament.
That loss, Huggins pointed out, came after a nightmarish trip that had them delayed 12 hours in Bridgeport.
“We saw every movie in town. We bowled. We ate. It had to have an effect. We were supposed to leave at 11:30 a.m., and we didn’t arrive in Minneapolis until 5 a.m.,” Huggins said.
The result, though, was to inspire this year’s team.
“It was a wake-up call for a couple of guys who thought, ‘We’re good. We can coast.’ That’s not the case. People may have looked at it as A-10, but they smacked us,” forward Da’Sean Butler said.
“That was a painful loss,” added forward Devin Ebanks. “We all hate to lose. That was not a good day for the staff or the team.”
Lose and learn, so to speak.
But do not confuse last year’s West Virginia team with this year’s, for it was a team that relied on three freshmen, that could not score, that lost its starting point guard and that was still in a developmental phase.
This year it is a bigger, stronger team — Ebanks is 20 pounds heavier, Kevin Jones 35, Wellington Smith 25 pounds heavier and over a stress fracture in his leg that remained a secret last year. In addition, the Mountaineers bring in a freshman named Danny Jennings who is a legitimate 260-pound brute.
“We were overmatched physically the last couple of years, but that’s about to change,” Huggins said. “Look at the front line Pitt had. We’re going to be like that now.”
The scoring will be better because Ebanks has worked hard developing a jump shot that Butler says “is close to automatic.”
And then there’s Casey Mitchell, the top junior college scorer in the country last year out of Chipola J.C.
“Some days people are going to walk out of the Coliseum saying he’s the best scoring guard they’ve seen here since Wil Robinson, and other days they’re going to walk out of the Coliseum saying, ‘Why the hell did they recruit him?’” Huggins said. “It’s a big step from Chipola Junior College to the Big East, and he’ll have growing pains.”
A year ago the Mountaineers didn’t lose when they scored 70 points, but getting to 70 was a chore.
This year, with the added firepower and experience, to say nothing of the ability to keep a fresh point guard on the floor and play more of a pressure defense, WVU is a legitimate Top 10 team, although it’s one of those legitimate “preseason” Top 10.
“I look at it like a joke,” Butler said. “It feels good to be noticed and it’s nice to see your name in national magazines, but you always have something to prove. We lost in the first round last year. We’ve done nothing.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
Expectations high for WVU men
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