This has been an eventful season for the never static relationship between Bob Huggins and college basketball officials. He fell down once and was given a technical foul. Another time he was asked if he wanted a technical, and Huggins, never one to flinch, obliged. Still, that’s only half of his season-long total, but technical fouls are only half the story.
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West Virginia v. Iowa State is a useful game because it gives me bookends for this conversation. The Mountaineers entered February with momentum coming from a promising win at Iowa State. Things were looking good for them, and remember they changed their spots and played small to score points and win at Hilton Coliseum.
Here’s the season box score on the first day of February.
In the eight games after scoring 85 points, shooting 48 percent and making 10 3-pointers at Iowa State, WVU is averaging 73 points, shooting 42 percent and making 6.7 3s per game. The season’s three lowest point totals and shooting percentages can be found in those eight games.
The season box score on the first day of March is different.
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The folks at Bovada updated their odds to win the NCAA tournament. True, February is the shortest month, but West Virginia went from 14/1 odds on Feb. 1 to 28/1 odds today. The Mountaineers have the 16th-best odds. For the optimists, Oregon was 28/1 last month and is 14/1 today.
The favorites might surprise you …
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Iowa State looks a whole lot like bad news for the Big 12 now. The Cyclones won their sixth straight game — and this is seven out of eight if you reach back and include a win at Kansas … and a loss at Texas — by cooling off Oklahoma State Tuesday night, and a team with seven seniors has already started its last stand. The stakes are clear for the rare Friday night game between Iowa State and No. 10 West Virginia at the Coliseum: The winner is the No. 2 seed in next week’s Big 12 tournament.
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Ominous screencap! The 49-41 score was the largest lead of the game for 10th-ranked West Virginia Monday night, and it was indeed the beginning of the end inside the Ferrell Center — just not at all the way you’d think.
The Mountaineers oftentimes settle into spots like this. Cumulative effect. Heavy legs. Tired guards. You know the routine.
This was not that.
No. 11 Baylor got a three-point play on this trip, and that started a 16-2 run. WVU was in real trouble when Lamont West had an open look at a straight-on 3-pointer that did everything but fall in and tie the score 54-54. On the other end, Baylor’s Al Freeman was open and hit a 3 for a 57-51 lead.
A miss and a swing, so to speak.
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You are looking live at the Ferrell Center, site of tonight’s now-or-never for both No. 10 West Virginia and No. 11 Baylor. Remember when the Bears was undefeated? Fifteen straight wins to start the season? Ranked atop the polls? They’re 8-6 since then, and all that time and energy spent angling for the conference title or a top-two or top-three seed in the Big 12 tournament is on the line tonight. Baylor can’t finish in second place and could finish as far down as fifth in the standings.
The Mountaineers, meanwhile, are on a pretty good run of play. They’re back in the top 10. This will be their 11th game in the top 10, and they’ve split the first 10. Scores can be manipulated. Outcomes cannot. After the Oklahoma-Kansas State blip, WVU is 7-2 with a (home) loss to streaking Oklahoma State and an overtime loss at Kansas. Consequently, WVU can’t finish worse than fourth and can finish as high as second. In fact, a win tonight and an OKlahoma State win tomorrow at Iowa State gives WVU the No. 2 seed.
I can’t even begin to explain to you how volatile the standings and tiebreakers are for the final eight regular-season games if Baylor wins tonight. The Mountaineers would do everyone a favor with a win. That’d be four in a row after going 1-6 against the Bears upon entering the Big 12.
No Esa Ahmad, if you were curious or hopeful that he might heal and appear. Not to take away from WVU’s struggle, but TCU played without a starter/surging scorer Saturday, and by the looks of warmups, in appears the Bears will go without Manu Lecomte. That’s a bigger loss than Ahmad or TCU’s J.D. Miller.
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Baylor point guard Manu Lecomte, a transfer from Miami, shoots 41 percent from 3-point range and has almost a 2-to-1 assist-turnover ration. He’s got a bad wheel, too, and missed much of Saturday’s second half at Iowa State. This is troubling news for the Bears, who committed 29 turnovers — “… tried to set an NCAA record for turnovers.” — in a loss at the Coliseum last month, have the Big 12’s worst turnover margin — minus 1.9 per game — and use a backup shooting guard as the backup point guard.
If Lecomte can’t play, Jake Lindsey will handle the bulk of the point guard duties after finishing with seven assists and two turnovers against Iowa State. Guards Al Freeman and King McClure will also do a great deal of ballhandling.
“Obviously Manu’s a great player and a big part of what we do,” Lindsey said. “He’s been in tough environments before and played against good teams. So you want to have as many good players as you can. I know he’s working to get back. But the rest of us are prepared to do what we have to do.”
In his second game since coming back from a three-game suspension for violation of team policy, Freeman enjoyed one of the best performances of his career against the Cyclones as he hit all five of his 3-point attempts and scored 17 points in 24 minutes.
“Al was really good, he passed the ball really well, he took good shots and he made shots,” said Baylor coach Scott Drew. “Defensively, he really gave us a great lift.”
What a day for Eron Harris. The erstwhile West Virginia guard, who once sort of likened himself to Kobe Bryant in that he said even Kobe’s teammates set screens so he could get open, but who also never lived in his past and did well to steer clear of sensationalizing his exit from the Mountaineers, had a bittersweet senior day for Michigan State. Harris previously had his college career come to an end with a gruesome knee injury — trust me, and do not google it — but his mom sang the national anthem yesterday and his coach made sure he received a proper send off at the end of the game.
Bob Huggins went to the bullpen late Saturday and didn’t bring in his Cy Young candidate, the one who stands tall, stresses the radar gun and once threw at his kid in a father-son game. He ofted for the lefty who throws changeups and curveballs and hasn’t known a fastball in the 90s for five or six years, and Huggins trusted that guy for a five-out save.
West Virginia — née Press Virginia — played a 1-3-1 zone for the final 5 minutes, 50 seconds — save one possession we’ll cover — and lived to talk about it. “It slows them down,” Huggins said. “We don’t know how to play it very well, but it slows them down. It slows everybody down.”
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The accommodating 2017 bubble sold some real estate Saturday, at least as it concerns the Big 12. Kansas State got waylaid at Oklahoma, and a 30-point loss is not the straw that stirs Bruce Weber’s drink. Texas Tech, which looked terrific early, lost at piping hot Oklahoma State, which really might have the Big 12’s coach of the year. (You still don’t want to see the Red Raiders.) WVU got out of Schollmaier Arena with a win and handed TCU a fifth straight loss, and that came before some Horned Frogs faithful took a separate L afterward.
Of those three — K-State, Texas Tech and TCU — only the Horned Frogs can wonder what might have been. Look at how open Desmond Bane is for this 3-pointer at the buzzer. And yet, I can’t imagine how WVU felt with the ball in his hands.
The Mountaineers didn’t have a lot go their way, and yet they had a lead with 4.1 seconds to go … and for all their hard work, all they could do was believe in a defense they only recently started using and then follow the ball from Bane’s hands to the left side of the rim.
On the road, in the 29th game of the season, that’s got to be brutal.
Yet the Mountaineers emerged with a win and a smile on their faces, because they maintained a perfect record..
“We’re undefeated when a guy’s hurt,” coach Bob Huggins said.
No. 12 WVU won for the second time in as many games without starting forward Esa Ahmad, the second-leading scorer who didn’t travel with the team for this two-game road trip. The Mountaineers are also 4-0 in two stints without starting guard Daxter Miles and 1-0 without starting forward Elijah Macon.
“I’ve got to find a way to get somebody hurt in practice,” Huggins said.
This is your WVU-in-a-nutshell statistic, right?
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