CONWAY, S.C. — Welcome to the final day of the Myrtle Beach Invitational, where we hope fans have recovered somewhat from Saturday’s football action and are ready to watch a Mountaineers basketball team that also finds itself in a little bit of a crisis at the moment.
West Virginia (1-2) plays in the third-place game of the MBI against St. Joseph’s (3-1), which features the leading scorer of the tournament and a pretty talented guard in Charlie Brown, and no, we’re not going to make any puns about Snoopy, Woodstock or Lucy pulling the football away here.
More important than a St. Joseph’s scouting report is the fact the Mountaineers are a team still looking for an identity. Are they going to be “Press” Virginia? Are they going to be a grind-it-out half-court team? Or are they going to be something else completely different?
That is something Bob Huggins likely took a hard look at during the Mountaineers’ day off on Saturday, as they prepared for the Hawks, who dismantled Wake Forest in the first round of the MBI, before falling to UCF in the semifinals.
Here’s what you need to know:
TV: ESPNU for the 4 p.m. tip-off. BETTING LINE: West Virginia is a 7.5-point favorite.
FOUR GOOD QUESTIONS
What did the Mountaineers do on the off day Saturday? According to Bryan Messerly, the Associate Athletic Director of Communications, the Mountaineers had no special site-seeing plans on the off day. Instead the team practiced at a local high school for two hours and then returned to the hotel to watch the WVU-Oklahoma State football game. After that, there was a team meal and a lengthy film session and probably some sort of walk-through. Huggins has traditionally made the these November holiday tournaments a business trip-like atmosphere. Not that players don’t get free time, but there usually aren’t plans made to go out and see the sites as a group.
What kind of team does WVU have without the full-court press? This is really the $100 million question and I’ll try to be brief. The whole “Press” Virginia thing was not all about defense. Granted, all the running around and trapping and getting steals looked pretty cool when it was at its peak, but at the core, the full-court press is just as much about creating some cheap offense as it is about playing defense. More to the point, when the Mountaineers created turnovers, it generally meant they were getting more shots than their opponents, which sort of covered up the fact they weren’t the best shooting team around. Through the first three games, in which the press has been mostly ineffective, opponents have the edge in field-goal attempts, 184-166. That’s not good news. If West Virginia stops pressing, then it likely becomes a grind-it-out kind of team that plays possession-to-possession at a much slower pace. This is especially true on the offensive end, because there aren’t a lot of great shooters, so you have to work the ball around and get the best shot you can. The team’s best shooter is Beetle Bolden and he’s playing with an injured shooting hand.
Does Derek Culver’s suspension hurt? Yes, in the fact that he’s the most athletic guy on the roster for a team that wasn’t as athletic as either Monmouth or Western Kentucky, according to Huggins. This is truly a guess, but I believe Huggins’ hope was to use Culver’s 6-foot-10 frame and athleticism and put him at the top of the press to create some havoc, much like the Mountaineers had back when Jonathan Holton was on the roster. Culver could help offensively, too, but how much offensive help he could have provided would be an uneducated guess.
How much does this game mean today? It’s hard to project what kind of team the Mountaineers will be in February when it’s still November, but if WVU continues to be a team with peaks and valleys, then this game could go a long way in determining the Mountaineers’ postseason fate. Why? Because it’s probable that St. Joes will have a pretty good year in the Atlantic 10 and if WVU wins, that will help down the road in terms of its strength of schedule. The same could also be said of WVU’s games against Pitt, Florida and Rhode Island. Those collection of games could be the difference between the NCAA tournament or the NIT, assuming the Mountaineers are competitive in Big 12 play, which that is a giant question meant for another day.
GUARDING THE THREE
OK, time for a St. Joseph’s scouting report. The Hawks shoot threes, a lot of them. They average just short of 27 3-point attempts per game and they are connecting on 40 percent as a team. Brown is connecting on 50 percent of his 3-point attempts, which would be pretty impressive, if not for the fact that teammate Taylor Funk is making 58.3 percent of his long-range attempts, and he’s listed at 6-foot-9 and 232 pounds. Those are the two guys the Mountaineers have to worry about the most.
ALLAN TAYLOR’S PICK
Allan is taking the Mountaineers in a close one, 69-65.
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