Bob Huggins called John Flowers the MVP Thursday night. He played a sneaky good game. Only four points, but a bunch of other plays that really mattered, especially as WVU pieced things together without Truck Bryant and looked very uncomfortable in the first half.

In retrospect, I think the Mountaineers were bothered because they were bothered. Does that make any sense? This is a team that has thus far laughed at and ignored all the things that are supposed to go wrong, but for many moments in that Sweet Sixteen game they looked there was a realization suggesting: “Whoa, this might be tougher than we thought.”

And that’s not just me saying that. Remember, this is a team that goes out of its way to decline admissions of discomfort, but would not after the game.

Q. For Devin and for Da’Sean, how uncomfortable was it in the first half without Bryant there to handle the ball? You guys had 13 turnovers. And what did you do to get things under control offensively in the second half?

DEVIN EBANKS: It was tremendously uncomfortable, especially this time of the year when we’re not used to bringing the ball up. Having our point guard out was a huge blow to us. We played kind of poorly in the first half. In the second half we kind of limited our turnovers. But still I think, in my opinion, we had too many turnovers in the second half.

DA’SEAN BUTLER: Yeah, it was a struggle, I’m not going to lie to you. I hate having to bring the ball up. But first half we came out there, we did a poor job of taking care of the ball. Coach even told us, keep passing the ball side to side instead of advancing it forward. You don’t have to beat the press just dribbling it. You can pass the ball ahead sometimes. We didn’t do a great job of that.
Second half we came out we did a better job. Still not a great job at all either. But we did a better — we were a little more assertive, bringing to the ball up the floor instead of having the ball over our heads or over-dribbling a lot. I think we did a better job the second half.

Enter John Flowers.

He was all right in the first half. He got yanked shortly into his first appearance, but was put back in just as WVU was in trouble. It was 20-14 and Washington seemed to feel good about a bunch of stuff, but when Flowers left it was a two-point game and he’d scored inside and blocked a shot and WVU had actually taken the lead along the way.

He was even better in the second half, where he played 13 minutes. Eleven of those came in succession in a critical stretch where WVU’s lead grew from seven points to 15. Following the game, Huggins addressed a question about Deniz Kilicli’s contributions and, when made aware it was the second-to-last question, went out of his way to praise Flowers as MVP.

I guess the impact was subtle. Flowers didn’t score 20 or make an enormous basket in a tight game, but given the circumstances without Truck and the way the opponent played, it was a pretty fortuitous feature.

I know, 19 minutes, four points, five rebounds and one assist, blocked shot and steal isn’t overpowering, but he’d scored two points in the previous four games, hadn’t had a steal the past three games, hadn’t blocked a shot in seven games and hadn’t played as many minutes since playing 19 in the triple-overtime loss to Pitt.

And for the guy known forIrish jigs, Twitter videos and pregame chokeslams, it was a different sort of publicity.

Not that that mattered.

“Huggs saying that about me means a lot, but I’m still going to be out there having fun,” Flowers said. “I’m still on Twitter. I don’t care if I’m known as the Twitter Guy or the game MVP. I want to have fun and I want to keep winning. This was fun. I had fun the whole game.”