MORGANTOWN — At some point, it has to be said that this West Virginia basketball team is not good defensively, not because it’s not capable, but because the majority of the players simply don’t care enough to do it.
Oklahoma walked out of the Lloyd Noble Center Tuesday night having made 27 of the 51 shots it attempted in a 72-59 victory against the Mountaineers.
“It’s not like they shot the ball great,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said. “They made lay-ups.”
Now, there are a lot of reasons why the Sooners got so many good looks around the rim.
We could go into the details and break down the number of times guys were getting caught up in screens like fish in a net on the Discovery Channel.
We could discuss the number of times a WVU defender simply stood there and watched their guy cut to the rim or how other guys tried to maybe help someone else and then let their own guy loose for a dunk.
All of it happened against the Sooners (16-14, 6-11 Big 12), but then again, it’s happened for the majority of the season.
“I’m embarrassed,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said.
Moments later, “We don’t compete,” he added. “We just don’t compete. We don’t have competitive guys.”
These guys don’t compete, because it’s become painfully obvious they simply don’t care.
Now, it’s not fair to lump all of WVU’s roster into this category. The younger guys have hardly played and it’s also obvious that some of the older guys like Pauly Paulicap and Malik Curry still very much care about what happens in a game. So, too, does Kedrian Johnson, but he’s playing hurt and not much at all at the moment.
The rest of them? You can’t make an argument for any of them about truly caring about playing defense other than a moment here or a moment there.
“I think overall we could have done a better job of shutting things down,” Paulicap said after the game. “We gave up too many easy shots. It’s been the same story (all season). Today, we had an opportunity, but we didn’t get it done.”
The last time WVU (14-16, 3-14) was this bad on defense was just four years ago, during the 2018-19 season, or the last time WVU finished dead last in the Big 12.
That team, physically wasn’t capable of playing defense. Sagaba Konate got hurt. Derek Culver was young and immature. Jordan McCabe wasn’t anywhere close to being physically ready to defend. Chase Harler wasn’t athletic enough.
There were physical reasons why that team allowed opponents to shoot 45.8% from the floor.
This WVU team is nearly as bad statistically — teams are shooting 44.5% — but it’s not because its roster is incapable, or not fast enough or not experienced enough.
It’s because most of them simply don’t care enough.
“We told them for three days they are going to drive it and then they’re going to cut from the other side,” Huggins said. “They must have done that five, six, eight times in the second half.”
That was basically Oklahoma’s game plan in the second half, and Huggins had basically given his players the answer to the test three days in advance.
It didn’t matter.
“We went over it and over it,” Huggins continued. “We showed them film. We showed them film on what happens when they don’t stay attached (to their man) or when they don’t absorb cuts from the other side. It makes no difference to them.”
You can say it’s late in a bad season, so that’s why the effort wasn’t there, but the effort hasn’t been there since — I would argue — mid-December.
That’s the saddest part of it all. All season players have been talking about “fixing” things. There’s no fixing not caring enough about your craft. That can’t be fixed.
And it won’t be fixed this season. Not on Saturday against TCU. Not in the Big 12 tournament or the CBI, if Huggins still wants to open up that can of worms.
“They get in trouble, because they don’t listen,” Huggins said. “They get in trouble when you say stay attached, you ought to stay attached.”
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