Gabe Osabuohien’s entry pass into the post was a fastball that instead hit the bottom of the backboard before ricocheting back to Oscar Tshiebwe, who then tried to power up a shot through two Baylor defenders and missed.
Emmitt Matthews Jr. made a nice curl around the foul line that got him open for a nice 14-footer that ended up hitting nothing and landed on the opposite side of the floor.
Jordan McCabe tried a pass to Derek Culver that wasn’t touched until it hit someone in the Ferrell Center crowd.
No. 14 West Virginia needed to play a perfect game Saturday.
That’s even after Baylor played without starting guard MaCio Teague, who sat out the game with a wrist injury. Even in Teague’s absence, the Mountaineers needed a near-perfect performance to pull off an upset.
That is either a comment on just how good Baylor actually is or just how far behind the rest of the Big 12 — minus Kansas — is compared to the top two schools in the conference.
That perfect game did not come on this day.
Twenty-two awful turnovers and a third consecutive game of not coming anywhere close to 40% shooting from the field made sure of that and doomed the Mountaineers (18-7, 6-6 Big 12) pretty much from the start.
A game after the point guards couldn’t hold onto the ball in a loss against Kansas, this time it was WVU’s powers forwards of Tshiebwe, Osabuohien and Derek Culver who combined for 14 turnovers.
Not that WVU head coach Bob Huggins was singing the praises of his point guards after this one.
“If you’re going to be a point guard, you’re going to need to know who is coming open first. That’s like being a quarterback,” Huggins said on his postgame radio show. “These guys would be the worst quarterbacks in the world. The world, because they wouldn’t know who to throw the ball to.”
Truth be told, it may not make a world of difference if they did, because there are no go-to, got-to-have-it guys on this roster.
By now, coaches would have hoped somebody would have stepped up or developed some consistency, but they haven’t.
This roster is athletic. The players have good character, but just not good enough aim.
Taz Sherman got hot in the final nine minutes and finished with 20 points and five 3-pointers, but the Mountaineers were already trailing by 28 points by then.
And it would be nice to think Sherman will build on the game when WVU hosts Oklahoma State on Tuesday, but it’s so hard to think that way right now, because it’s mid-February and no WVU guard is really building any momentum at the moment.
And it’s hard to play a near-perfect game when everything is just a complete grind all the time.
Sooner or later, WVU will break out of this funk.
The Mountaineers may get a little something going against Oklahoma State. They may even go on the road and build a few positives against TCU or Texas.
It’s likely WVU will look better against Oklahoma inside the Coliseum than it did in Norman, Okla. last week.
“We need to win six, starting with Oklahoma State at home on Tuesday,” Huggins said. “They’re coming off a big win against Texas Tech today. We need Mountaineers fans not to give up on us. We’re not going to quit. We need them not to quit.”
But this much has already been decided: When WVU plays a true top 10 team — not one that falls out of the rankings three weeks later, like Ohio State — the Mountaineers will come up short this season, because they can’t stop turning the ball over and they have no one who can hit shots and they don’t make a lot of foul shots, either.
Those are WVU’s tendencies and they are very difficult to change in mid-February.
Against the rest, WVU can man up and guard, power it down low, rebound, muddy-up the game and have some success.
Against Baylor (23-1, 12-0), against Kansas, Gonzaga, Louisville or whomever WVU meets down the road in the NCAA tournament, it has to do all of those things AND make plays on offense AND not turn the ball over 22 times.
To this point, WVU has shown it simply can’t do it.
“It’s not a fault of our interior guys, totally. It’s not the fault of our perimeter guys, totally,” Huggins said. “It’s a total joint effort.”
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