MORGANTOWN — Let there never be another word spoken that Kansas center Hunter Dickinson is the best player in the Big 12.
Not from Jayhawks’ coach Bill Self. Not from any other Big 12 coach or player. Not from any TV or radio announcer covering the league.
No one.
To be sure, the Big 12’s best player was on the Allen Fieldhouse floor Tuesday, as WVU pulled off one of the program’s all-time historic victories with a 62-61 win against No. 7 Kansas.
That would be WVU point guard Javon Small, who won the game with a free throw with 1.8 seconds remaining.
Small’s stat line: 13 points, 11 rebounds and six assists while playing basically the entire game, minus a quick breather in the first half.
“What a gritty effort by him,” WVU head coach Darian DeVries said on his radio postgame show. “I think I subbed him out for about 45 seconds. He was exhausted and he should have been.”
Dickinson, meanwhile, was solid with 10 points and 12 rebounds, but the big 7-foot-2 mountain of a man has now been outplayed down low not once, but twice by WVU bigs who aren’t exactly threatening to have their jersey retired.
You may remember last season’s 91-85 upset in Morgantown, a game in which Pat Suemnick had 20 points and six rebounds.
This time around, it was journeyman Eduardo Andre — his career path has gone from Nebraska to Fresno State and now to WVU — who had the bigger impact with 15 points and six rebounds.
Andre absolutely dominated the early stages of the game off pick-and-roll plays with Small, as the WVU point guard continued to thread the needle with passes that Andre turned into dunks.
“I’ll do whatever they need me to do,” Andre said two weeks ago after filling in for an injured Amani Hansberry.
Andre did exactly that, filling in once again for Hansberry and playing his role perfectly in order for the Mountaineers (10-2, 1-0 Big 12) to pull off this major upset.
“We did a lot of different stuff with Javon that we’ve been working on for a while,” DeVries said. “We had to get him on the move a little bit more, and then we did some new things with some double ball screens.
“Now, their help guys were a little bit out of position and weren’t sure what to do.”
Let’s put this all into proper context for a moment. WVU entered the game 0-11 all-time at Allen Fieldhouse.
The Mountaineers were without long-range bomber Tucker DeVries, still out with an upper-body injury. They were without Hansberry, another 3-point shooter and the team’s leading rebounder.
The team didn’t arrive in Kansas until around 3 a.m. Tuesday morning, the result of a malfunction to the charter plane that required a second plane needing to be flown in.
For added measure, when the team woke up after a couple hours of sleep, the power was out at the hotel.
There wasn’t just one reason why WVU should have lost this game by 20, there were literally a dozen of them.
“I’m incredibly proud of the guys’ effort, especially with the circumstances with the injuries and the travel,” Darian DeVries said. “Like we talked about, there are no excuses in this program. We’re going to line up and we’re going to compete.”
And even with the odds stacked against him, DeVries just pulled off one of those moments that WVU fans will never forget, as in you’ll remember where you were 20, 30 years from now whenever this game is mentioned.
The reason was small, er, Small, that is. In the clutchest of moments — the type that so many other WVU players in the past had faced and failed at Kansas — he pump-faked and got Jayhawks big man Flory Bidunga into the air and forced a foul.
With just 1.8 seconds left, Small missed the first free throw — you almost expected that, didn’t you? — but calmly nailed the winner on the second attempt.
That’s what players of the year in any league do, and Small better have that type of respect from this point forward.
“Like I told him before the game, we needed him to have the ball in his hands and we’re going to put all of this on you,” DeVries said. “He’s been here before. He’s been in this environment. We trust him to make those decisions, and he did an unbelievable job with that.”
