MORGANTOWN — The answer was rather simplistic, which is sort of the point to what type of product this WVU men’s basketball team can put on the floor.
“I don’t know how else to put it, you’ve just got to make easy shots,” was the way WVU point guard Javon Small put it.
Easy shots. Easy plays. Easy passes.
In the game of college basketball, those things may look uncomplicated. If you’ve been a WVU fan recently, you already know they’re not.
We’re talking about more than just last season, too, a disaster that finished with a 9-23 mark.
You can go back into the memory banks — or YouTube, whichever is easier — and listen to former coach Bob Huggins talk time and again about his players missing those darned “one-footers,” or throwing passes to the wrong team.
Poetry in motion has not been the way to describe the WVU men’s hoops program since about 2018.
Instead, car wrecks come to mind. Did he really just do what I think he did comes to mind. Bad shots, selfish play and no chemistry whatsoever are very recent memories.
And then this group of Mountaineers, led by first-year head coach Darian DeVries, took the court last Friday for an exhibition game.
OK, yes, it’s completely understood that the opponent — the University of Charleston — is a Division II school that offered up little resistance.
Yet the style of offensive play DeVries unfolded was pleasing to the eye if not in the neighborhood of beautiful.
“I feel like it’s all based off of team chemistry,” Small continued. “We all know what we came here to do, which is to win. We know we need to play together, so I feel like sharing the ball isn’t a problem for anybody.”
It was beautiful for its simplicity. WVU finished the night with 13 assists, none of which were exactly memorable or worthy of a highlight on the evening news.
And that was absolutely fantastic.
“You can get sped up pretty easily, especially in the first game,” WVU forward Tucker DeVries said. “I thought everyone slowed themselves down and made the right plays, especially with not really running any sets.”
No one stuck out like a sore thumb. Even when big guy Amani Hansberry handled the ball out beyond the 3-point line, he played like he belonged there.
Everyone seemed like they were playing as one unit and not five individuals trying to piece it all together.
That’s what it was supposed to look like with a first-year coach, a new system and basically 13 guys who had never played before minus a few games over the summer over in Italy.
“I thought offensively we had very good ball movement,” Darian DeVries said. “We were very connected in our cutting and those types of things. They were very unselfish. They were all things I was very pleased with.”
Passes were thrown to the right people. WVU went 13 of 19 on lay-ups.
Again, all of this sounds like rather simple stuff, and if there’s something to be said of DeVries’ system, it just might be his players will make the easy plays look, well, easy.
They didn’t turn the ball over. WVU had just seven, with the last one coming on a shot-clock violation late in the game when the team was trying to run out the clock.
The first impression with these Mountaineers is they will not beat themselves on most nights. They will not get in their own way.
You have no idea how much relief that will likely bring to a lot of WVU fans.
Will it translate to more wins? That’s the ultimate question.
Rebounding the ball is going to be an issue, actually, it’s going to be a major issue.
Nights when WVU isn’t connecting on the 3-point shot, those might be some long nights in the Big 12.
This wasn’t Phi Slama Jama in WVU uniforms, very far from it.
Yet it was also very much textbook and fundamental basketball.
“I think our guys, collectively as a group, have a good feel for the game,” Darian DeVries said. “They have a good IQ, and they play to those strengths. They’ve done a great job this summer and fall on learning to play with one another; move and share it.”
You were almost waiting for the old-way Mountaineers to pop back up at some point with some type of stupid pass or having the ball bounce off a guy’s face on a fast break.
It never happened.
Man, that was fun to watch.
