COMMENTARY
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — If there was ever a time to remind you of the old saying of being careful what you wished for, well, we are firmly there right now where it concerns the 11th-ranked West Virginia men’s basketball team.
Having spent the better part of Bob Huggins’ 14 seasons as head coach watching a program being built around toughness, defense and determination, this group of Mountaineers — despite what the national ranking says — is falling short of those gritty expectations.
“We didn’t play with a lot of aggression,” Huggins said after WVU fell to Florida, 85-80, inside the WVU Coliseum on Saturday. “We’ve got a guy in the corner guarding a guy and the ball almost rolls up his leg and we don’t get it. We’ve got the ball on the floor and we got guys standing there and they got two guys diving at it. You’re not going to win like that.”
Some of us wanted more than gritty.
I’ll throw my hand up and admit right now that a lot of those games — both the wins and losses over 14 years — were sometimes difficult to watch.
They were slow paced and filled with fouls. They were boxing matches on a basketball court.
The best offense generally was simply missing a shot, so WVU’s big guys could go grab it and be closer to the rim when they got it.
They were ugly, as ugly as a beaten up Subaru at a sports car show.
We wanted pretty, maybe not all the time, but at least on occasion. We wanted more points. We wanted guys running up and down the floor and scoring in transition.
We wanted athletes and shooters, not bar-room brawl guys.
Look at the last two games. WVU needed every bit of 87 points to beat No. 10 Texas Tech on Monday. The Mountaineers (11-5) would have needed 86 to beat the Gators (10-4).
They averaged 84 points in those two games and combined for 20 3-pointers and Derek Culver came away with a career game of 28 points and 12 rebounds against Florida and Deuce McBride had 24 points, seven rebounds and six assists against the Red Raiders.
All of that is pretty. It looks good and fresh and hip and fun to watch and just about anything you could have hoped for while watching all of those other games over the years.
Here’s the thing, and Huggins knew this all along despite what the rest of us had wished for: Pretty may get you a ribbon, but it doesn’t win college basketball games.
Sometimes, yes, you win a shoot-out here and there, but you don’t build championships on them.
This is where the college game differs greatly from the NBA, because defense matters a heck of a lot more in college than it does in the pros.
If you can’t play it, you’re not going to win in college, no matter how many times your team fills up a box score with impressive offensive stats.
“We have to keep teams out of the middle,” Culver said. “We’ve become lackadaisical. We’re not playing to the best of our abilities. We’re letting other teams get in their sets and things like that.”
Florida shot 55% (16 of 29) in the second half, and that comes on the fact the Gators didn’t make a basket over the final 3:22 of the game.
Go back to those grind-it-out WVU teams. There were so many times when opposing teams had difficulty making 16 field goals for the entire game. Florida did it in one half.
So, spare me the discussion about the offense looking better. Spare me the talk of how much more space there is and how WVU can spread teams out and this and that.
Honestly, that’s all true, but there is a flip side. There’s now more room for the opponents to drive into the lane and either put up a shot or kick it out to a wide open 3-point shooter in the corner.
WVU just gave up 172 points in two games. You can talk about how the last couple of possessions were disasters against Florida. You can talk about missed free throws.
These last two games were about a lack of defense. WVU was fortunate to win one, not so fortunate against the Gators.
“Defense to a large degree is about heart,” Huggins said. “It’s about competing and when you don’t compete you get exposed. We got exposed. We have been getting exposed. We’re not as competitive as we once were, but I think you can say that about youth in general.
“We had way more aggressive guys in the past. We’ve got good guys and they’re all be successful, but they’re not as competitive.”
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