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Baby steps?

 

OK, so this didn’t look good or turn out well for West Virginia and for Beetle Bolden Saturday. This was at least symptomatic of the sort of errors the Mountaineers make throughout and seemingly especially at the end of ball games. This, of course, exasperated the head coach, Bob Huggins. “It’s hard to imagine what goes through some guys’ head sometimes,” he said.

The win against Texas Tech perhaps needlessly went to two overtimes — and WVU was maybe fortunate Keenan Evans cooled off for a moment and didn’t end it at the end of the first overtime — but Huggins saw some positives when he saw the Mountaineers playing the mental game in which they so often do not succeed.

When things went bad — like losing the tip in the second overtime or missing two shots soon thereafter — WVU had the wherewithal to make something good happen.

“I was just trying to read it,” Carter said. “The first two tips, they tipped it that way. You hear them talking, ‘Tip it back. Tip it back.’ I was just trying to get in the right position.”

Carter raced to the basket for a layup, and the end of the prolonged drought gave WVU the first of six straight points. He managed to catch even himself by surprise, though, because Carter wasn’t sure he’d steal the tip and didn’t know how free he was after he did.

“At first I was debating if I wanted to shoot a 3 or get to the basket,” he said. “Why not shoot a layup?”

Later in the second overtime, Carter missed a short jumper from the right side one possession before Nate Adrian missed a jump shot from the foul line. After both misses, Dax Miles scored on the rebound and before the ball came back down.

“I’ve got a good feel for when somebody wants to shoot the ball,” said Miles, who had 11 points after scoring 10 total this month. “I know where they like to shoot it, so when the shot goes up, I go full-speed to try to get it.”

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