MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Bob Huggins readily admitted he didn’t have to volunteer West Virginia’s services to go up against top-ranked Gonzaga.
The No. 11-ranked Mountaineers had already begun to climb in the na tional polls after winning the Crossover Classic championship last week.
And while wins against South Dakota State, Virginia Commonwealth and Western Kentucky presented challenges, questions still remained among WVU coaches on where exactly the Mountaineers stood on the national level.
“I wanted to test our guys and see where we are,” Huggins said after the Mountaineers fell to the Bulldogs, 87-82, on Wednesday in the Jimmy V Classic. “Now, we see where we are and we’re as every bit as good as they are if we just don’t do dumb things. We’ve got to cut out the dumb things, which generally we do.”
The loss to Gonzaga showed flaws in the Mountaineers’ defense that WVU’s first three opponents never could.
In erasing a five-point halftime deficit, Gonzaga shot 61.8% in the second half.
For the Bulldogs, it was a mixture of running good offense and scoring in transition.
Gonzaga had 60 points in the paint and 40 of those came in the second half. The Zags also had 14 of their 25 fast-break points in the second half.
“It was penetration off of ball screens,” Huggins said. “We got back cut five or six times. To me, that is inexcusable. When you’re told and told over and over again and you work on it, you shouldn’t get back cut. Particularly on an open side when a guy is dribbling at you. You should know it’s coming. Actually, you should steal the ball, which is what we used to do and then they stopped doing that. We just have work to do.”
Most of that work leading up to Sunday’s game at Georgetown in the Big East-Big 12 Battle, Huggins said, will come in the form of tweaking WVU’s approach to defending ball screens and pick-and-roll situations.
“A lot of it was ball screens and we’re going to have to change our ball-screen defense,” Huggins said. “These guys aren’t capable of doing what other guys did. That’s part of it, you have to figure out what guys can do. Without giving them a crutch, you try to put them in positions where they can be successful.”
Changing WVU’s approach to defending screens was a topic Huggins was adamant about.
“I think our coaching staff ought to shoulder the blame, because we tried to guard ball screens and obviously our guys aren’t capable of guarding ball screens that way,” he continued. “That’s all of us. I think everybody had some input on that.”
In facing the Hoyas (1-1), WVU will face a team going through its own defensive problems.
In getting beat by Navy, 78-71, on Tuesday, the Midshipmen shot 60.6% in the second half. For the game, Navy scored 40 points in the paint and 19 more off of Georgetown turnovers.
The Hoyas have four players averaging double figures in scoring, led by senior guard Jahvon Blair, who scores 20 points per game.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do,” Huggins said. “We did an extremely poor job of guarding ball screens. We fell asleep too many times. We just made some careless errors that came back to bite us.”
TWEET @bigjax3211
