By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — West Virginia’s basketball team is ranked No. 6 in the country.
It is also undefeated.
And it’s in trouble.
On Saturday, Cleveland State exposed the Mountaineers’ greatest weakness, which is ball handling, and may have written a blueprint to beating them.
The Vikings unleashed a relentless press on West Virginia and turned the ball over constantly, erasing a 17-point lead before falling by two points on a play that quite honestly just as easily could have gone the other way.
Rest assured the Mountaineers will see similar pressure the rest of the way, and they really may not be able to do anything about it.
One of the problems is that Joe Mazzulla’s injured left shoulder that underwent surgery last year is not yet healed and, in fact, may never be.
He’s been trying to play through pain but left in the first half on Saturday in obvious discomfort and spent the rest of the game on the bench with ice on the shoulder.
That takes away the Mountaineers’ best ball handler, maybe just for a brief amount of time, maybe forever.
“It doesn’t look good,” was all Bob Huggins would say after the game.
Here’s the dilemma. Huggins can’t get any scoring offense out of Mazzulla, if he can play, because he can’t take his arm above his shoulder. And, at crucial times in the game, he can’t use him for fear teams will foul him.
A natural left-hander, he’s converted to a right-handed free throw shooter but is not nearly as good as he was left-handed.
That means Darryl “Truck” Bryant has a lot of pressure on him and it also means that Huggins has got to use either freshman Dalton Pepper at guard, he being more of a shooter, or forwards Da’Sean Butler or Devin Ebanks. Each of them can handle the ball, but are miscast in the role, hurting the offense as it was pictured.
To add to the worries, Casey Mitchell has had fluid drawn from his injured knee and has not impressed Huggins with his zeal in attempting to come back, making the guard position undermanned.
“It’s just what it is right now,” Bryant said. “If I have to play some more, I’ll just have to do it.”
Were it not for the play of Kevin Jones, the forward who has emerged as a star out of necessity, this Mountaineer team would really be in trouble.
When Ebanks had to miss three games for unspecified reasons and after injuring his hand, causing it to be wrapped, WVU was soft up front and at guard, but Jones became a savior, scoring and rebounding, especially on the offensive boards.
Against Cleveland State, he hit 9 of 10 field goal attempts with a career high 23 points, taking some of the scoring pressure of Ebanks and Butler as they had to turn into ball-handlers.
It was his pass to a cutting Butler that led to the winning field goal with 1.2 seconds, a opening that he could have easily missed, considering the chaos that had come out of Cleveland State’s press.
WVU takes a step up in class on Wednesday when former Huggins assistant from his Cincinnati days, Andy Kennedy and his Ole Miss Rebels, come to the Coliseum.
It would not be surprising to see Wellington Smith, the senior forward who struggled against Cleveland State, go to the bench for the Mississippi game while Huggins plays Jones, Butler, Ebanks, Bryant and John Flowers.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
