MORGANTOWN — Having seen West Virginia’s offense sputter, Bob Huggins said there was a plan in place to have guards Taz Sherman and Sean McNeil come off designed screens against Texas Tech.
“We put in a motion-kind of thing, where we did a lot of screening for those two guys,” Huggins said after the Mountaineers’ 78-65 loss against No. 18 Texas Tech on Saturday. “I take that back, we were supposed to have a lot of screening for those two guys. Didn’t happen.”
This wasn’t an idea drawn up on the fly. Huggins said the team spent the better part of two days working on it in practice.
When it came time to actually play the game, Sherman and McNeil combined for 22 shots, but the majority of those were in isolated one-on-one situations and rarely were they seen coming off a screen to get an open look.
“We didn’t run what we had practiced we were going to run,” Huggins said. “We went over it two days in practice. We went over it before the game. We went at every timeout and they still never ran what I asked them to run.”
WVU (13-5, 2-4 Big 12) will enter Wednesday’s game against Oklahoma eighth in the Big 12 in scoring at 68.7 points per game and just a tenth of a point above last-place Kansas State.
Even with Sherman second in the conference in scoring, WVU’s 42.5% field-goal percentage is last in the league and is the lowest since the 2019-20 season.
“We’ve got to get into our offense better,” Sherman said. “We’ve got to make sure everyone knows the offense. It’s been a little hectic. Other teams scout us just as much as we scout them. They already know to take away two players and let everybody else figure it out.
“We have to be a team that adapts to that. We just can’t have me and Sean just dribble or Malik (Curry), Keddy (Johnson) or (Jalen Bridges) just dribbling at the top of the key with no ball movement going on. We’ve got to get better movement on the court and we’ve got to get into our sets better and pass the ball better.”
It becomes a question of why, as in why weren’t WVU players running the offense the way they were instructed?
“Truth be known, I’ve given them too much rope,” Huggins said. “I’ve let them screw up and calmly tried to fix it. It’s like any other line of work, if you continue not to do what you’re asked to do, you’re probably asked to leave. I haven’t done that.”
Huggins even went as far as admitting he would draw up a play on his clipboard during a timeout and then the players would do something entirely different once they were on the floor.
“I don’t know why it doesn’t happen,” Huggins said.
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