INDIANAPOLIS — There were two statistics in West Virginia’s Elite Eight victory Kentucky game that pushed coach Bob Huggins’ emotional button.
The first was 73-66, which was the final score, sending a very happy Huggins back to the Final Four after an 18-year absence.
The second was 51-36, which was the disparity in rebounds, Kentucky possessing the 51.
Huggins did not take kindly to that.
See, Huggins would rather hit his thumb with a hammer than to see a rebound go to the other side.
Fifty-one of them? That’s a lot of throbbing, and when Bob Huggins is in pain, so, too, are his players.
So it was that Huggins, after giving his team Saturday and Sunday off so that he could spend Monday celebrating and Tuesday getting madder and madder over the rebounding failures of his team, was somewhat on edge come Tuesday’s practice.
“It was a back-to-reality practice,” WVU forward Kevin Jones revealed.
Reality, in this case, meant blood, sweat and tears, probably in equal numbers
West Virginia doesn’t get outrebounded very often. Only seven times in 37 games has WVU lost the battle of the boards.
They do it on length, on athleticism and on desire … but against Kentucky you would have thought it was men against boys, the Wildcats taking down almost everything.
“They were really big and hard to box out,” Kevin Jones said. “Luckily, we did other things good and got them tired and frustrated.”
When outrebounded, Huggins finds a way to get the point across to his team that it won’t happen again anytime soon.
They averaged 41.5 rebounds per game coming off those games, three higher than their yearly average.
This becomes a factor as the Mountaineers move into Saturday’s 8:47 p.m. game against Duke in the national semifinal because this is not the same Duke team they beat two years ago, doing it by muscling them around.
In that game, WVU was too physical for Duke. They had Joe Alexander pulling in 11 rebounds and Joe Mazzulla collared the same number.
When the final accounting was in, WVU had 47 rebounds to 27 for Duke, the Blue Devils managing only 7 offensive rebounds and did not score a second-chance point.
Duke expects more of the same from this WVU team.
This time, though, they believe they will be ready for it.
The Blue Devils have grown up in two years.
They have the Plumlee brothers, Miles and Mason, both 6-10, one of them 230, the othere 240, and they have Brian Zoubek, who stands 7-1 and weighs in at 260. Toss in Lance Thomas, who is 6-8 and 225, and there’s depth in the front court to banging against West Virginia’s smaller, leaner players.
“We’re a more physical team this year,” guard Kyle Singler said. “You have to look at our big men. Off the bench you have the Plumlee brothers. In 2008, we didn’t really have a big man presence. With Brian, Lance, Miles and Mason, those are four guys that are big and physical. They can take more fouls.”
In many ways, Duke is quite reminiscent of Kentucky, which also was big up front and had some talented scorers. For the Blue Devils it’s Scheyer, who averages 18.2 points a game, Singler, who averages 17.6 and Nolan Smith, who averages 17.4.
“They’re a very talented team,” Da’Sean Butler said. “They do all the right things and do what their coach asks them to do and they are successful for it.”
West Virginia has been good all year on finding a defense for a scorer, but this team has three of them.
“It will be a big challenge, for sure,” Butler said. “We obviously don’t take anyone lightly and we will get after it on the defensive end. It will be difficult to do that and it will take a total team effort.
“We can’t let any one of them go off and score at will. We will have to play 40 minutes at both ends of the floor to beat Duke. We can’t take a possession off because they have a good enough team to make you pay if you aren’t working hard.”
But West Virginia has a few weapons of its own, perhaps the best being how battle tested they have been, playing and winning close games, having a go-to guy in Butler and having survived through the Big East season and tournament.
“They are tough and gritty and play good defense,” Zoubek, the 7-footer, said. “Obviously, they can hit some really big shots and they find a way to win the really tough games. With the conference schedule they play in the Big East they aren’t going to be intimidated by a big game.”
NOTES: It appears certain that Darryl “Truck” Bryant will miss the Duke game with the broken bone in his foot … When WVU squares off against Duke it mark their first April basketball game ever. Does that mean there is no more March Madness? … While much is made about WVU’s shooting weakness, the Mountaineers are hitting 43.1 percent this year and Duke just 43.9 percent. Do not foul Duke, either, for the Blue Devils hit 76.1 percent of their free throws.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
