By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — The newspapers tell you that West Virginia University is the No. 11 or 12 team in the nation, depending upon whether you believe the writers or the coaches are the ultimate source in ranking teams.
The newspapers lie.
Those rankings are an illusion, a distortion of imagination and reality.
On the one side, you can imagine West Virginia being the No. 3 or so team in America, based on what you expect to see when they go on the court.
On the other side they are probably no better than the 20th or so best team in the nation, based on what you do see when they go on the court.
The question is, by season’s end, which way will they go.
It would seem, with No. 25 Ohio State coming into the Coliseum on Saturday for what should be a festive day during which Hot Rod Hundley will have his No. 33 uniform retired, West Virginia’s season could break in either direction and it hinges on which way Devin Ebanks goes.
For most of the year, the pollsters were willing to treating the Mountaineers as if they were living the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” They seemed to be parading around naked while everyone was admiring their wardrobe.
Black uniforms don’t necessary change what’s in them.
This is a team that lost to Notre Dame, which is hardly a powerhouse. It’s a team that beat Marquette by a point, the point in that being Marquette became the first team Big East team to lose in the regular season to DePaul since March 6 … not the last one, the one in 2008.
It was romped over by Purdue, a team some suspected to be a Top 10 team until it lost three of its last four games.
Even Marshall managed to carry the Mountaineers into the final minutes of Wednesday’s Capital Classic. Unranked teams are not supposed to be able to do that against teams playing at a level that would indicate they are ready to challenge for a national championship.
To add to the belief that West Virginia’s lofty poll position is more illusion than anything else, consider that the Mountaineers’ best player, Da’Sean Butler, made this statement after it was over:
“This was one of the best games we’ve played all year,’’ Butler said. “As far as working together and playing defense and rebounding, it was one of our best.”
If basketball were just defense and the willingness to bang and bang hard, WVU would probably already have been named national champion, for the Mountaineers will get inside your shirt when it comes to defending you.
They may not lead the nation in shooting percentage, but they lead in bruises – both received and dished out.
But for whatever reason, they just haven’t clicked.
It’s really been strange, as noted by Seth Davis’ Hoop Thoughts, an online blog that was quoted by the Daily Mail’s Michael Cassazza:
“A Big East coach who has scouted West Virginia told me that part of the Mountaineers’ problem is that their guards who can defend are not good shooters, and their guards who can shoot are not good defenders. Case in point: The Mountaineers could not hit outside shots against Syracuse’s zone, but when Bob Huggins substituted Casey Mitchell into the game, Brandon Triche, the Orange’s freshman point guard, took him to school.”
It is almost two platoon guard play that coach Bob Huggins has had to use, although it is looking more and more like he’s moving toward playing his two point guards, Truck Bryant and Joe Mazzulla, at the same time as often as he can.
But it isn’t just that. The shooting is pedestrian, at best. The inconsistency has made coaching the team a nightmare, for Butler hasn’t done it and others like Wellington Smith and Casey Mitchell can’t seem to get the ball to fall.
Worst of all, there has been an imposter parading around as Ebanks.
The Ebanks we all came to know last year was a carpenter on the basketball court, a man with all the tools. This year, the flair is not there, to put it in rather elementary poetic terms.
His shooting, ball-handling, rebounding … all of it is not Ebanksian, to coin a term.
And West Virginia, at its best, revolves around his many talents, talents that had people talking about him being a one-and-out player. Now, it would appear, he is in need of a third college season unless he can figure out a way to put the pieces together through the last week of January, then into February and, of course, the madness that is March.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
