By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — There are days when West Virginia turns the ball over a lot. It drives Bob Huggins crazy, but he can live with it.
There are days when they miss a lot of shots. That drives Huggins crazy, too, but he can live with that.
Even turnovers don’t send him off onto a tirade.
But play bad defense and you hear words that would make Lisa Lampanelli blush.
So it was that as West Virginia took the floor against Duquesne on Wednesday night in the Coliseum ranking 16th and last in the Big East in field goal percentage allowed, defense was the word of the day and while the Mountaineers struggled in a lot of areas of the game, defense was not one of them.
Duquesne, a team averaging 68.2 points a game, managed to score only 39 in one-sided 68-39 WVU victory, the sixth straight for the unbeaten, sixth-ranked Mountaineers.
The Dukes, coached by Fairmont-native Ron Everhart, came in shooting 43.5 percent from the field but were smothered, the Mountaineers allowing them just a 31.8 shooting percentage. In the second half they managed to shoot only 26.3 percent, getting off only 19 shots and making but five of them.
The defense was so overpowering that Duquesne
was able to get only six assists in the 40 minutes that had to seem like 40 days, while turning the basketball over 24 times.
“We guarded pretty good,” understated Coach Bob Huggins.
Now it’s true that Duquesne was shorthanded.
“I knew it was going to be difficult to come in here and play without two of our starting guards and it certainly was,” Everhart said. “We got shut out right off the bat and we tried to respond but we couldn’t keep them off the offensive glass and they shut us off defensively.”
To be honest, it may not have mattered if they had John Stockton and Steve Nash at guard the way the Mountaineers were guarding. It was like there two players in each Duquesne jersey, one of them also wearing a WVU shirt.
This was especially true for Bill Clark, Duquesne’s top scorer. He came into the game carrying a 17.4 scoring average.
He scored his first basket — no, make that his only basket — with 5:14 remaining in the game.
He finished with six points, hitting one of nine shots.
It was Da’Sean Butler who made up for one of those offensive nights he’d like to forget, hitting 3 of his 13 shots and scoring 10 points, who closed the barn door before Clark could get out.
“He’s a great … er, good player. He can shoot,” Butler said.
Not from the places Butler had him shooting from.
“We extended the defense out,” he said.
How far?
“To the coach’s box,” Butler answered.
“Someone always had a body on him,” Kevin Jones said. “He knew what he wanted and he didn’t get any open 3s. We made him drive.”
Whatever Duquesne tried to do failed to work. WVU was bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic and really determined to increase the defense to the point where … no, not that they stopped the Duquesne offense but where they got the coaches off their back in practice.
“We made No. 30 (Clark) uncomfortable,” guard Joe Mazzulla said. We forced him into bad shots.”
The Mountaineers camped out in the passing lanes, grabbing off 11 steals.
As for the offense, well, can you say Kevin Jones.
Jones finished with 16 points on 6 of 10 shooting, some inside, some outside, working the offensive boards enough that he had seven offensive rebounds, which was more than any Duquesne player totaled both offensively and defensively. In fact, he had only one fewer offensive rebound than the entire Duquesne team … and two of their offensive rebounds were credited as “team rebounds.”
West Virginia returns to the Coliseum Saturday against Coppin State.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
