CLEVELAND — Here’s the choice you have.
You can walk barefoot across a bed of red hot coals, sit naked in a freezer at minus-10 degrees for an hour, swim across a mile-wide lake filled with hungry piranhas and angry alligators or you can show up for Bob Huggins’ first practice this week.
Not to influence you any way, but I’d take any of the first three choice — maybe all at once — before I’d show my face at Huggins’ practice … and Huggins was the winning coach in Saturday’s 80-78 game at Cleveland State.
If you’re into heroics, in the end it was a layup by Da’Sean Butler — isn’t it always him? — off a pass from Kevin Jones with 1.2 seconds remaining that accounted for the difference, but if you think Huggins was bouncing happily off the bench when his No. 6-ranked Mountaineers went to 8-0 with this victory, you don’t know Huggins.
This is a man who can find something wrong in Christmas, so rest assured when his team plays as badly as it played against Cleveland State’s press, rest assured that his reaction at the end made “Bah, humbug!” sound like “Merry Christmas.”
“I’ve tried dealing with them,” Huggins said of his players. “They’re going to have to start dealing with me.”
That, by the way, was not a threat, just a reality of life as a West Virginia player when you are playing the game the way the Mountaineers are.
And how would that be, you ask?
This is how Huggins sees it.
“We just think things are easy,” he said. “We can’t get five guys playing hard at once. I don’t think we’ve 10 minutes all years where we had guys on the same page. I’ve never had a team give up so many layups in my life.”
Layups, for a while in this game when Cleveland State went into its full-court pressure — pressure that forced a season-high 17 turnovers, leading to 28 points off turnovers. 22 of them in the second half — it looked as if it were layup line.
Now you would suspect that Cleveland State may have caught the Mountaineers by surprise by its press, but you would be wrong there, too.
“We knew the press was coming,” Huggins snapped. “When you’re supposed to have a good team you’re going to have some big leads and teams are going to have to press you. We work on the press breaker all the time.
“I’ve done a helluva job teaching it, haven’t I?” Huggins continues. “How many times can I tell them not to throw the ball backwards? How many times do I tell them not to take it down the sideline?”
Now there is some extenuating circumstances. Guard Joe Mazzulla, who is capable of breaking a press, left the game in the first half with his left shoulder hurting so badly that he was cringing and openly wincing.
“It doesn’t look good,” Huggins said of the injury, but he could have been talking about the team, too.
And then there was guard Casey Mitchell, another player who might handle the ball, who was left behind in Morgantown with an ouchy knee, although Huggins said recently that he didn’t believe Mitchell had done enough work to recover from the injury.
Not matter, whatever it was, things went haywire twice after the Mountaineers had built 17-point leads, each time those leads melting away like the last snowstorm of winter on the first warm spring’s day. In all, Cleveland State had 14 steals in the game.
Those are Rickey Henderson like steal numbers.
The result, of course, is that Cleveland State’s shooting percentage for the game 50 percent. You want to see the hair on the back of Huggins’ neck stand straight out, shoot 50 percent against his team.
“We’re giving up 45 percent for the year,” Huggins said, emphasizing that this was not a one-game aberration. “We gave up 39 percent last year in the best conference in the history of college basketball and the same guys are now giving up 45 percent.”
He said it almost as if he were promising that such a figure would go down, but it’s tough to make such promises when your team is staggering like the Mountaineers are.
“I can fix a couple of guys,” Huggins said, “but I can’t fix seven, eight or nine of them.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
HERTZEL COLUMN: WVU players about to feel Huggins’ wrath
- Bob Herzel
-
-
Jones nears milestone as Notre Dame visits WVU
That it is a crucial game in a season that seems to have nothing but, today’s 9 p.m. visit to the Coliseum by a streaking Notre Dame team comes with a historical footnote in the history of West Virginia University basketball.
Kevin Jones enters the game having scored 20 or more points in nine consecutive games. -
WVU source: Battle to join Big 12 nearing conclusion
Indications were growing that West Virginia University’s battle to leave the Big East and join the Big 12 in time for the 2012 season was about to be won, possibly as early as today.
A source within the Mountaineer athletic department said on Tuesday that the matter was nearing a conclusion and also told the Times West Virginian that West Virginia would be reinstating a golf team to compete in the Big 12. -
HERTZEL COLUMN: WVU, Irish strikingly similar
Consider, if you will, that it is Nov. 25 past, that the West Virginia University basketball team is running a routine drill four games into its season, getting ready for the Akron game when Kevin Jones goes down in a heap on the floor, his ACL torn, his season over.
-
WVU source: Battle to join Big 12 nearing conclusion
Indications were growing that West Virginia University’s battle to leave the Big East and join the Big 12 in time for the 2012 season was about to be won, possibly as early as today.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN - Truck drives Mountaineers to needed win
Perhaps it is what has kept him going through a West Virginia basketball career with as many turns as a trip to Pineville down in Wyoming County, but Truck Bryant enjoys being Truck Bryant.
-
WVU finds a way, wins in overtime
Truck Bryant made the headline plays, including a 3-point shot with 3.3 seconds left to play, as West Virginia saved its season with an 87-84 overtime victory at Providence, but the subheads had to be reserved for Deniz Kilicli and a pair of freshman guards.
-
Mountaineers face critical test today at Providence
The schedule tells you it’s another game in the marathon run that is the Big East season, a trip to Providence to play a team with only two conference victories, but somehow everyone connected with the West Virginia University program knows today’s noon meeting with the Friars is much more than that.
-
HERTZEL COLUMN: Jones on the brink of WVU history
On the one hand there is yesterday’s Warren Baker, who entered the WVU Athletic Hall of Fame in the latest class for the work he did from 1973 to 1976, and on the other hand there is today’s star Kevin Jones, who has emerged from the shadows of the likes of Joe Alexander and Da’Sean Butler this year to carve his own niche in Mountaineer basketball history.
-
WVU backs out of Florida State game
West Virginia University has canceled its Sept. 8 football game at Florida State.
Once again, as they have done with virtually everything since announcing they planned to move from the Big East to the Big 12, they did it behind closed doors, without any announcement or statement. -
WVU women upset Louisville
It is foolhardy to put it up there with the Baylors and Notre Dames of the women’s world just yet, but really if you look closely and see potential, much of which came out Saturday afternoon when the Mountaineers upset No. 12/14 Louisville, 66-50, you realize that this team is closer to greatness than it is to mediocrity.
- More Bob Herzel Headlines
-
Jones nears milestone as Notre Dame visits WVU
