MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — The 14th-ranked West Virginia men’s basketball team woke up Tuesday on the right side of something that could have gone very wrong.
The Mountaineers were 12 minutes away from falling to ninth place in the Big 12 and a 19-point deficit stared directly at them.
Very little would have looked good in that scenario if the Mountaineers hadn’t pulled off a come-from-behind 87-84 victory against Oklahoma State on Monday.
Not with No. 4 Texas coming to the WVU Coliseum on Saturday and a trip to No. 2 Baylor three days later.
“They’re all hard,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said. “You look at what Texas did to Kansas, at Kansas. We got them coming in on Saturday, which is a great challenge.”
Afterward, WVU players spoke openly about the adjustments needed since the departure of forward Oscar Tshiebwe.
Those adjustments go further than simply plugging Fairmont native Jalen Bridges into the starting lineup.
“Honestly, adjusting to some of the things that happened previously has been tough,” WVU point guard Deuce McBride said. “We didn’t have much time to prepare for that. Those things happen and you have to adapt.”
The Mountaineers (9-3, 2-2 Big 12) have adapted with their version of small-ball, although it may be difficult to call any lineup with the 6-foot-10, 255-pound Derek Culver in it small.
“If we can spread the floor and put (Bridges) at power forward, J.B. is going to make shots for us,” Huggins said. “We can spread people out, which enables (Kedrian Johnson) to get it into the lane and pitch it to open people. It allows Deuce to score more in a more one-on-one situation.
“Most importantly, it gets everybody off of Derek. He takes a beating, but I thought tonight he was terrific and hopefully we can continue down that road with him.”
It is a smaller, quicker lineup that matches the growing trend in basketball. WVU was bucking that trend playing Tshiebwe and Culver at the same time.
Now, the Mountaineers have combined to go 23 of 48 (48%) from 3-point range in the two games without Tshiebwe and are playing at a faster pace.
“For the most part, we’ve had to adjust playing without Oscar,” Culver said. “We’re pretty much open with four out (on the perimeter) and we’re able to get the guards to fluctuate up and down the sidelines and get a little more movement. I think as long as we keep fine tuning everything, we’ll be all right.”
It results in more points for the Mountaineers, but also lends to more points for the opposition, too, since there are more possessions for each team.
Oklahoma and Oklahoma State combined to shoot 45% from the floor and they averaged 65 shots, where WVU was allowing 58 per game with Tshiebwe in the lineup.
“I don’t think we could be any worse defensively than we’ve been the last two games,” Huggins said. “Until the end of the (Oklahoma State) game, we were horrible. We gave up so many straight-line drives and middle drives. It seemed like everything we said don’t do, they did. We’re going to have to get better defensively, no matter what we do.”
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