By Bob Hertzel
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.
