Second-half surge leads No. 17 West Virginia past Oklahoma State

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — It looked all too eerily familiar for a while, but in the end, No. 17 West Virginia took its own struggles from the past two weeks and handed them off to Oklahoma State.

The shooting struggles. The scoring droughts. The bad passes and turnovers.

West Virginia faced some of that again during its 65-47 victory Tuesday against the Cowboys, before an announced attendance of 12,053 inside the WVU Coliseum.

Oklahoma State (13-13, 3-10) faced more of it. Much more.

BOX SCORE

“We haven’t been playing as desperate as we needed to over the last three games,” said WVU guard Jermaine Haley, who finished with nine points in the win. “We got back to playing with some energy like we should have been playing the whole season.”

After Oklahoma State made nine of its first 12 shots to take an early 22-12 lead, West Virginia (19-7, 7-6) became more determined to play the type of defense that had been the talk of the Big 12 last month.

Rather than letting a poor start spell doom in another loss, West Virginia players somehow found out basketball was fun again.

Bob Huggins postgame press conference after Oklahoma State.

“We really didn’t make many defensive adjustments,” WVU forward Derek Culver said. “The coaches stressed to us the same things they had stressed before about not letting them drive and getting to the help.

“Really, we just started having fun again. It’s fun to play defense. We found our energy again and it started to make a difference in the second half.”

The results? Oklahoma State went nearly the first 12 minutes of the second half with just one field goal, as WVU erased a 33-28 halftime deficit and turned it into a 48-37 lead with 8:42 remaining. The Cowboys were held to just five second-half baskets in all and shot 35.3% for the game.

“Obviously it was a tale of two halves in many ways for our team,” Oklahoma State coach Mike Boynton Jr. said. “They’ve been struggling a little bit here these past few weeks. They lost to some really good teams and they responded the right way today.”

West Virginia coach Bob Huggins, who tied legendary North Carolina coach Dean Smith with his 879th career victory, went to a different starting lineup in this game.

Taz Sherman made his second career start, and Miles McBride his first, as Huggins was looking to shake things up a bit.

After the duo got off to a slow start, they responded.

First it was Sherman, who shrugged off an 0 for 4 start to finish with nine points. He got hot in the first half to begin the Mountaineers’ comeback.

McBride made it official to start the second half with two long jumpers that gave WVU a 34-33 lead with 18:03 remaining. He tied Sean McNeil for a team-high 11 points.

Oklahoma State never held the advantage again, as Sherman added another jump shot and teammate Gabe Osabuohien even threw up a 15-foot prayer that was answered as the shot clock expired.

Haley had a prayer of his own answered at the buzzer to end the first half.

After having three passes knocked out of bounds with four seconds left in the half, Haley hauled in Sherman’s inbounds pass and connected on a 3-pointer in the corner that came out of the rim before somehow rolling back in.

“I told them to throw it to Jermaine in the corner every time he was down there,” Huggins joked.

And for one night, there was no talk of losing streaks or dropping a seed in the NCAA tournament, as WVU simply took care of business.

“We need to keep doing that,” Haley said. “We’re getting ready to go back out on the road and everybody knows we haven’t played well on the road this season. We’re playing two teams (TCU and Texas) that we’ve already beat, so they’re going to be pumped to play us again.

“We just have to take this momentum and keep playing hard and show everyone else what we’re really capable of.”