By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — They played a game of basketball at the Coliseum on Wednesday night.
This is what one of the coaches said.
• “I told my team I’m not going to have a heart attack over this.”
• “We were sloppy, terribly lazy, lackadaisical.”
• “We’ve got to get better.”
And those were the words of Mike Carey, whose West Virginia Mountaineers won by 36 points, 64-28.
You can only imagine how horrible the opponent, Radford, was.
The Highlanders, which would be Radford, did not play as well as their 0-5 record would indicate.
How bad were they?
Well, you can put it a lot of ways, but there were 867 people who ought to get the $5 they paid to get in back. Fact is, if they knew what kind of game was coming and what kind of opponent Radford would be, they wouldn’t have come if you gave them $5.
At halftime Radford had 3 baskets.
THREE!
At the half they possessed a grand total of zero assists and 13 turnovers.
The second half wasn’t much better, they finished 8 for 48 shooting, which is 16.7 percent.
And no, they weren’t blindfolded.
Radford recorded three assists and 23 turnovers.
“They scored all their points off free throws and our turnovers,” Carey said, referring to his team’s 23 turnovers. “It wasn’t like we played good defense. They just missed a lot of open shots.”
In some ways you felt like you were in a “Bizarro” world after the game, for here was a team that had won by 36 points and could find nothing — absolutely nothing — good to say about the game.
If you wonder why that might be, listen to what Carey had to say.
“I’m not coaching to beat Radford. I’m coaching to beat Connecticut, to beat Ohio State, to beat Notre Dame. If we play like that we’ll get beat the way we did by Ohio State.”
That was a rather disappointing 23-point loss, 92-69 in Columbus.
If you were looking for something good to say, the Mountaineers were balanced.
Everyone was equally bad.
Even Liz Repella, who is the leading scorer. She finished with 13 points but was frustrated with a few airballs and with four turnovers and just assist.
The scoring was balanced, Repella with her 13, Sarah Miles with 12, Korinne Campbell with 10. All ten players played and all 10 scored, which would have been nicer had not nine of them contributed to the turnovers. Only Jessica Capers escaped the turnover bug in her six minutes of play, which won’t earn her Big East Player of the Week honors but might earn her mention as WVU Player of the Week.
The shame of this was that it came after the team won the Nugget Championship in Reno, Nev., playing well and beating Iowa and host Nevada, then had two good practices upon returning.
But none of it was evident when they took the floor.
There were two good things about the game, however.
One, was that it eventually ended.
The other?
“I can’t wait for practice tomorrow,” Carey said, licking his chops.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
