COMMENTARY
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — There is a sort of unwritten rule in sports journalism that whenever the star player has a star game, the focus stays right there.
At the very least, it has to be mentioned pretty high in the story.
Well, as No. 17 West Virginia put the finishing touches on its 91-79 victory against No. 23 Kansas on Saturday inside the WVU Coliseum, the Mountaineers actually had three star players all come up with big games.
Deuce McBride scored a career-high 29 points. Taz Sherman followed with a career-high 25 points and Derek Culver added 19 points and nine rebounds and was nearly unstoppable over the game’s first nine minutes.
There, it’s been mentioned.
We are breaking that rule today, though, and in a game where the Mountaineers (13-5, 6-3 Big 12) scored an impressive 91 points against the Jayhawks, it is extremely difficult not to credit WVU’s defense for the victory.
“It was 100% our defense,” said McBride, who also added eight assists and seven rebounds in the win. “Obviously, they were getting step-in threes (in the first meeting in Dec.) and they got a few rebounds today and were able to kick them out, but I think we cut that down. Honestly, our defense was way more aggressive today than it was back then.”
It was just a few days ago when WVU head coach Bob Huggins was calling this bunch of kids the worst defensive team he’s had … ever.
Sure, maybe some of that was just an attempt to kick his guys in the butt a little bit and get them going, but Huggins has never really been a guy to say something simply just to say it.
“Yeah, I believed it,” Huggins said. “I believed a lot of it. I’m not opposed to trickery, either. If that’s what it takes to get them playing better or playing harder, I’ll try to trick them.”
And so we look at this game through a defensive lens.
Kansas, which lives off of driving to the basket, could do very little of it in the first half.
The Jayhawks didn’t attempt a free throw until the 7:51 mark of the first half and that came when Christian Braun was fouled on a 3-point shot.
It wasn’t until the second half that Kansas began to look like Kansas, and even then, it came only in stretches.
Much of that was the Mountaineers simply manning up and guarding the guy in front of them.
WVU forced 18 turnovers. There were no easy and wide-open 3-pointers like Kansas had in the first meeting and that some other teams have had against West Virginia this season, which prompted Huggins’ comments in the first place.
“I feel like we made most of the shots they took difficult,” Sherman said. “I feel like we did a good job of closing off their driving lanes. They always try to go baseline and try to find (Ochai) Agbaji and Braun, their best shooters in the corner. We tried to stop that. That’s what killed us against Texas and Iowa State, so we tried to stop that.”
The box score tells a slightly different story. It says Kansas still made 45% of its shots, grabbed 15 offensive rebounds, still scored 79 points and scored 44 points in the paint, but the box score is a big liar liar pants on fire in this one, because the Mountaineers maybe played their best defense of the season in this win.
Or maybe that’s also a credit to the Jayhawks, who are obviously a talented bunch and well coached.
“Some of those shots you just have to live with,” Sherman continued. “Sometimes good offense beats good defense.”
“I thought we were pretty good. I thought our on-the-ball defense was better. Our help defense was better,” added Huggins. “That was our best defensive performance of the year and we still gave up 79.”
So, my apologies to the star offensive players in this game. Your efforts did not go unnoticed.
It’s just for the first time in a long time, the Mountaineers’ defense rose to the occasion and it was maybe the biggest star of the game.
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