MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Spending his time at home during the coronavirus pandemic, Bob Huggins said he recently began binge watching the TV series Naked and Afraid.
“I wouldn’t want to do it, but it’s kind of fun to watch,” the West Virginia men’s basketball head coach said during on online chat with media members Monday.
Concerning the NBA Draft status of his two prized forwards Oscar Tshiebwe and Derek Culver, Huggins didn’t seem too afraid of not having either back for next season.
Tshiebwe entered his name into the draft last week, but said he was keeping his options open for a return to WVU.
“Let me put it this way, I fully expect we don’t have to worry about it,” Huggins when asked how WVU might look next season without Tshiebwe on the roster.
As for Culver, “I’ve never heard anything once so ever that Derek Culver is interested in submitting his name to the draft,” Huggins said.
The deadline to declare for the draft is April 26.
Both forwards were the two leading scorers and rebounders for a WVU team that finished with 21 wins and ranked No. 24 in the country in the final AP poll.
Tshiebwe’s status may be slightly different in that he has already submitted his name, but the pre-draft process this summer will be unlike any others that preceded it.
Huggins called it “uncharted waters,” because it is likely the COVID-19 virus could wipe out the NBA Combine that is scheduled May 21-24 in Chicago, as well as any opportunities for players to work out for NBA teams.
“The reality is and what everyone is having a hard time grasping is there really is no exploratory (measures right now),” Huggins said.
Instead, what Tshiebwe and other underclassmen who are applying for the draft will only have is an evaluation from the NBA Undergraduate Advisory Committee, which is a pool of NBA general managers who give a draft projection on each player who applies.
“What we have now is, they’re going to say hypothetically you might be the 18th pick, and I’m just throwing that out,” Huggins said. “What they don’t say is there may be seven Europeans that nobody knows about who are going to come over, which is going to drop you down seven more spots. So, this draft you have less and idea of where you’re actually projected to be drafted than in any draft we’ve had in a long time.”
Since coming to WVU, Huggins has had 10 underclassmen apply for the draft. Of the previous nine, Kevin Jones, Juwan Staten, Esa Ahmad and Jevon Carter decided to return to school, while Joe Alexander, Devin Ebanks, Sagaba Konate, Devin Williams and Elijah Macon all turned pro with eligibility remaining.
Some of those decisions to leave early, Huggins believes, came from players listening to the wrong people.
“Quite frankly, we’ve had guys who got the wrong people in their ears and they’ve made terrible decisions,” Huggins said. “It cost them very lucrative careers, because they listened to somebody who cared more about what they were going to get out of it than what the player was going to get out of it. That’s always what we try to guard against.”
With that in mind, Huggins said the 6-foot-9, 260-pound Tshiebwe, a native of the Democratic of Congo, will listen heavily to the advice WVU coaches are giving him.
“Oscar is going to listen to us. Oscar trusts us,” Huggins said. “We’re not going to lead him down the wrong path.”
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