MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Early foul trouble and then an apparent leg injury in the second half for Charles Bassey limited the match-up between Western Kentucky’s big man and West Virginia’s Derek Culver.
While the marquee for the Crossover Classic title game may have read No. 15 West Virginia vs. Western Kentucky, the true college basketball fans had all eyes on those two behemoths.
Culver, who is 6-foot-10 and 260 pounds, understood that, and to a certain degree, said he had a little more anticipation than normal to see how they would both fare against the other.
“First off, Charles Bassey is a top-tier player. He’s a really good player and he’s got a bright future,” said Culver, who finished with 15 points in the Mountaineers’ 70-64 win against the Hilltoppers. “I feel like everything went well. I didn’t feel uncomfortable playing against him. I got to the moves I wanted to get to. He didn’t really take anything away from me. I feel like I handled my own.”
Bassey, who is 6-11 and 235 pounds out of Nigeria, finished with 15 points and eight rebounds. He entered the game averaging 16 points and 11 rebounds.
But, he picked up his second foul less than four minutes into the game and sat out the rest of the first half.
In the second half, after taking a fade-away shot along the baseline, Bassey came up limping and headed straight for the Hilltoppers locker room. He came back into the game three minutes later.
Bassey ended up playing 18 minutes and Culver played 29.
Getting some stops
Faced with a 10-point deficit with 15:36 remaining in the game, WVU head coach Bob Huggins was forced to call a timeout.
In recent seasons, Huggins has talked about the difficulty of making in-game adjustments, because he was dealing with younger players.
In terms of what led the Mountaineers to finish the game on a 35-19 run, Huggins said it wasn’t so much about changing around his Xs and Os.
“The biggest thing you’ve got to do is stop people,” Huggins said. “You’re not going to catch up if you don’t stop people. That was the majority of the discussion at halftime is we had to stop somebody. We didn’t do a very good job on their initial sets and then we gave up too much offensive rebounds and gave up too many loose balls. We cleaned that up a little bit better in the second half.”
After shooting 51% in the first half, WVU held Western Kentucky to 36% shooting in the second half.
“I thought they changed the tempo of the game a little bit,” Western Kentucky head coach Rick Stansbury said. “We have to learn to play through that. I thought we started to settle and we had some turnovers. There was a shot-clock violation and a charging foul. There were three possessions out of four trips I think changed the game.”
Getting more guys in
As this season wears on, Huggins believes the Mountaineers will be better with a little deeper rotation.
Freshmen forwards Isaiah Cottrell and Jalen Bridges combined to play just six minutes Friday, and combined to average nine minutes of playing time per game over the tournament.
“We’re trying to get some guys in to see what they can do,” Huggins said. “We really like Isaiah and we need to get him in the game more. The games ended up being closer than we would have liked. We’ve got to get some of those guys in the game a little bit more so they can help us when we need them to help us and to play big minutes when we need them to play big minutes.”
Another championship
This was the sixth Thanksgiving tournament the Mountaineers have won under Huggins.
The others: The 76 Classic (Anaheim, Calif.) in 2009, the Puerto Rico Tip-Off in 2014, the Las Vegas Invitational in 2015, the AdvoCare Invitational (Orlando, Fla.) in 2017 and the Cancun Challenge last season.
TWEET @bigjax3211
