INDIANAPOLIS — Here’s a little secret, one that shouldn’t be a secret by the time a team reaches the Final Four, as West Virginia has, but no one seems to notice it.
The Mountaineers can play this game of basketball.
You listen carefully to all the talk this week — and this week is nothing but talk right up to Saturday night — and you’d think the only way the Mountaineers could be favored would be if this were a toughman contest.
You don’t hear from anyone about how Joe Mazzulla can slash to the basket, or how Devin Ebanks can soar with the eagles or do spectacular things with his feet firmly planted on the floor. You don’t read about Kevin Jones shooting lights out from the outside, then grabbing more than his share of offensive rebounds.
Wellington Smith? When was the last time you heard anyone walk about his jump shot.
Only Da’Sean Butler gets due as a player, and that’s only because it is impossible to ignore it with the resume he has compiled.
What do you hear from opponents?
Well, here’s a sampling from Duke:
• “They are tough, gritty and they play good defense.” — Center Brian Zoubek.
• “I think they’re a tough team, they have tough players.” — Guard Jon Scheyer.
• “They gut out their wins, their team has a knack for winning and that’s something we’d like to do as well.” — Scheyer again.
It’s almost as if Duke believes it is going to put up its dukes to win.
All of this, surprisingly, is fine with West Virginia, so fine in fact that they showed up at Final Four interviews at Lucas Oil Field wearing T-shirts that carried the motto “We Do What We Do.”
“That’s a slogan Huggs came up with,” Kevin Jones explained. “We are what we are. We don’t need to be doing things we’re not good at. We play defense and we rebound.”
“We’re not jump shooters,” said Da’Sean Butler, stating the obvious. “Hey, you can’t impress everyone. You can’t have everyone as friend. If we couldn’t play very good, we wouldn’t be here now.”
The idea that WVU plays hardnosed defense and rebounds but doesn’t score a lot is just the way it is.
“It goes back to the shirt,” Devin Ebanks said. “We’ve done great things but if people don’t see you can’t get disturbed. We don’t care what people say.”
The question, however, is where did Huggins come up with the phrase.
He admits to plagiarism.
It goes back to his early days coaching at Walsh College in Ohio.
“Sister Marie Helene told me that she would hand out a piece of paper and pencil to her students and have them write something 25 times,” Huggins recalled.
Naturally, a magna cum laude like Huggins was interested in why she would do such a thing when she could just teach the lesson.
“People learn different ways,” she told him. “Some learn by writing, some by hearing, some by touch.”
It made sense to Huggins, and so it was that he incorporated into his thinking that him just telling people something might not necessarily make them learn it, that he made need to drive the point home in other ways.
One such way is to write it across their chest.
By now you are wondering why this was important with this team. Turns out, it’s important with almost every team.
“The first few weeks of practice I just let guys go. They dribble behind their back, shot shots they can’t make. Then, after a couple of weeks, I tell them, ‘OK, you’ve shown me everything you can’t do. I’m comfortable with it. Now stop doing it.”
Normally they do.
Some players, however, just can’t quite get it.
“I remember a number of years back I got a call from one of my players who was going into the NBA draft. He said, ‘Coach, my agent tells me to shoot 15- to 17-foot jump shots to show the pros I can make them,’” Huggins said.
“You can’t make them,” Huggins responded, simple as that.
Later, Huggins got hold of one of the super agents out of Cincinnati, Ron Shapiro, and told him what the agent had said.
“Can he make ‘em?” Shapiro asked.
“No,” said Huggins.
“Then, let them guess if he can make ‘em or not,” Shapiro instructed.
Moral?
“We Do What We Do”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
