SYRACUSE, N.Y. —
This one echoes through the depths of the West Virginia coal mines as the sun was setting behind the hills. It rang through the halls of the factories, blaring above the noise of the roaring equipment.
This one, a 69-56 victory for West Virginia University over Washington, was for the men and the women who have calluses on their hands and dirt under their fingernails, who wear hard hats but have soft hearts.
This game that carries Bob Huggins and the Mountaineers into the Elite Eight, one game from a return to the Final Four for the first time since he was in his third year coaching at Cincinnati, facing a Kentucky team that is the blue-blooded antithesis of all that is West Virginia, was for you, West Virginia.
“Let me tell you what the governor told me before the game,” Huggins said, referring to a conversation he had with Gov. Joe Manchin III, who was in attendance.
“They piped this into all the factories and all the mines and everything, the play-by-play because otherwise guys were trying to get off their shift. They wanted to watch the game, so they piped it in. It’s piped in everywhere in the state of West Virginia.”
They don’t understand that in some places, just as they don’t understand what it is to be a West Virginian.
Huggins would tell the gathered media of the nation.
“Everybody in West Virginia is listening to the game or watching the game. That’s how much it means to our state. There’s such great pride there. And for me, having played there and being born there. My mom and dad are both from Morgantown. So I understand. I understand how much it means, and I think the great thing is these guys understand how much it means to the people.”
These guys are his West Virginia players, most of them from out of state, but in their own way underdogs like the Mountaineer people themselves, possessing the same feelings.
“This is a great bunch of guys,” Huggins said, but then added something very telling by saying, “and they’re way better people than they are basketball players.”
That is saying a lot because they are pretty good basketball players, good enough to have accepted everything Huggins has brought to them. In an era when the heroes are all the offensive players, when it’s Kobe and Michael and Dwight Howard and Dwayne Wade, they have accepted playing defense and rebounding.
“I have a harder time convincing them to run offense than I do to play defense,” Huggins said.
Indeed, Washington came in averaging 79.9 points a game. West Virginia stuffed them, held them 23 points beneath that average.
And rebounds.
Oh, rebounds. WVU finished with 49 of them. They grabbed 23 offensive rebounds.
The final tally on second-chance points? WVU 17.
That’s it. Just West Virginia 17. Washington got none. Zero. Nada.
You talk about a blue-collar effort, the Mountaineers were mining second-chance points.
“Our best chance of making a shot was missing it,” Da’Sean Butler said.
We will not bore you with the goings on in the first half. If you watched it, you were bored enough.
West Virginia came into the game wanting to hold the score down against a high-scoring Washington team, one averaging 79.9 points a game.
They did that, but it’s doubtful the game plan was to produce a combined 24 turnovers to do it.
The Mountaineers had a week’s worth of turnovers in the first half, 13 of them, with Devin Ebanks somehow managing to score two points while recording four turnovers, a ratio that doesn’t normally lead to much in the way of success.
It was interesting that Huggins, never one to do the expected, pulled Casey Mitchell out of hibernation and started him in place of the injured Bryant, but that lasted less than three minutes, and when he followed him up with the seldom-used Dalton Pepper, it was also as much for shock effect as anything else.
In the end, Joe Mazzulla got half of the first-half minutes playing the point.
The game was so sloppy that Huggins decided he’d turn it into a war of attrition, put Deniz Kilicli into the game and bodies began to fly. The big Turk muscled his way around inside as all of a sudden the Huskies didn’t looks so husky.
In five minutes, he scored 6 points and because of it the Mountaineers were able to head to the locker room down only 29-27.
In the second half, talent took over. Kevin Jones made most of the key baskets, scoring 18, while Butler had 14 and Devin Ebanks 12. With Bryant out, Ebanks played a lot of point, had five assists but also had eight turnovers while Mazzulla did his best there with four assists and three steals.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
