MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — With plans to play big men Derek Culver and Oscar Tshiebwe together next season, Bob Huggins is about to embark on a grand experiment in the Big 12.
Both behemoths have NBA-ready bodies, with the “smallest” being the five-star recruit Tshiebwe, who stands 6-foot-9 and 245 pounds.
Both have NBA potential, too, which is where this story about the Mountaineers and the Big 12 begins.
The Big 12 is no stranger to recruiting and playing sizable young men, with Texas really leading the way in that category since WVU first joined the league in 2012.
Since that time, the Longhorns have had four big guys drafted in the first round: Myles Turner (2015), Jarrett Allen (2017), Mo Bamba (2018) and Jaxon Hayes was taken by New Orleans last month.
The best big man in that time belongs to Kansas, which saw Joel Embiid taken by Philadelphia in 2014 and he has since taken the league by storm.
Those five centers make up a third of the Big 12’s first-round picks since 2013.
And even with all of that, the Big 12 will probably never be identified as the second coming of the old Big East.
The word “probably” is thrown in there, because Big 12 hoops is undergoing a transformation of sorts, thanks mostly to Chris Beard and how he’s running things at Texas Tech.
The Red Raiders’ run to the Final Four last season — built mainly on defense and limiting opponent’s possessions — opened up a few eyes around the league.
When WVU first joined in 2012, the Big 12 was a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of league.
It was a wide open prairie built to be a perfect fit for guys like Trae Young, Buddy Hield, Marcus Smart and Andrew Wiggins.
Defense wasn’t exactly a league-wide top priority, maybe outside of the state of Kansas.
It was guards running loose with teams using a big guy to set screens, rebound and to basically occupy enough space to keep the opponent’s big man away from the shooters.
The number of schools in the Big 12 who still are offense-first are no longer the majority.
And this is where Culver and Tshiebwe come in.
“A lot of rebounds,” Huggins said about his expectations of his two big men. “We can go back to dominating the glass like we did at one time.”
Their presence will go much further in terms of stopping drives to the basket on defense and points in the paint on offense.
Will they be the focal point? Some. To be sure, the Mountaineers will still rely mostly on guard play and how much small forward Emmitt Matthews Jr. has improved may be the key to the season, but to overlook the importance of Culver and Tshiebwe would be a grave mistake.
With those two in the Mountaineers’ lineup, it no longer becomes a matter of WVU trying to match up with the rest of the Big 12. The rest of the conference now has to figure out a way on how to keep Culver and Tshiebwe from dominating down low.
And that’s the unique part. Sure, some Big 12 teams have had some good big guys. Even outside of the guys listed earlier as draft picks, there was also Rico Gathers at Baylor, Devin Williams at WVU and Cameron Ridley at Texas.
Having two at a time when the Big 12 is shifting more towards defense could be the start of the Mountaineers recovering from a woeful 2018-19 season.
FOLLOW on Twitter @bigjax3211
