MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - West Virginia coach Bob Huggins, decked out in a Little General pullover and khaki pants, visited with media Thursday afternoon on the eve of his 11^th basketball campaign at WVU, and his 36^th overall.
 
Official practice begins this afternoon.
 
Just like nearly all of his others, this year's team is once again expected to be very good with a number of key players returning from last year's Sweet 16 squad that was just a couple of bad possessions away from knocking off NCAA Tournament runner-up Gonzaga in San Jose, California, last March.
 
Senior guard Jevon Carter was the NABC, Lefty Driesell Defensive and Big 12 Conference Player of the Year last season who will give Huggins a strong backcourt player that all good teams need to have.
 
He averaged 13.5 points per game while handing out 137 assists and making 92 steals during his breakout junior campaign. Carter was invited to participate in Chris Paul's prestigious CP3 Elite Guard Camp and also took part in the Nike Skills Academy this past summer.
 
"He's playing with a supreme amount of confidence right now," Huggins said. "You come in here as a freshman and the game goes fast. You're trying to keep up with the game and for JC the game has slowed down for him. If he's not the best on-the-ball defender in the country, he's right up there."
 
Huggins said Carter is beginning to reap the rewards of the hard work he's put into the game.
 
"He's not a guy who shows up for practice, practices and then goes home and goes to sleep or goes and does whatever," he said. "He comes up, he watches practice tape, he watches old game tapes and he really wants to be a great player."
 
Fellow senior Daxter Miles Jr. has appeared in 100 career games, starting 91 of those, and pairs with Carter to give West Virginia one of the most experienced backcourts in the country.
 
Miles Jr.'s junior numbers in 2017 were down a little bit from his sophomore campaign, but he did turn it on toward the end of the season with 23 points against Iowa State, 18 points in an NCAA Tournament third-round victory over Notre Dame and a career-high 10 rebounds in the Gonzaga loss.
 
He is now 153 points shy of scoring 1,000 for his career.
 
"Dax is Dax," Huggins said. "Some days he makes them all and some days he struggles a little bit, but he plays hard. You don't have to worry about his effort at all.
 
"The hard thing is when you have five new guys and you've got to try and coach them all. I don't have to coach JC and Dax," Huggins said. "They know what they're doing. They know what's expected of them."
 
Suspended junior forward Esa Ahmad won't be available to the team until halfway through the season, so that means either sophomore Lamont West or newcomers Wesley Harris, D'Angelo Hunter and Teddy Allen are going to have to step up and play more minutes than previously expected.
 
West appears most suited for the task based on the experience he got last year playing behind Ahmad as a freshman. The 6-foot-8-inch, 230-pound Cincinnati resident scored 21 points in a home loss to Oklahoma State and contributed a season-high 23 points on six-of-eight shooting in a home win against Texas.
 
Harris and Hunter are long, lean, athletic junior college players with plenty of athletic ability while Allen is a high-scoring prep standout from Mesa, Arizona.
 
"De'Angelo has had a good summer and Wes has had a good summer," Huggins said. "They were going to play anyway. Lamont has been really good, too."
 
How much Harris, Hunter and Allen can help the Mountaineers will be determined by how quickly they pick things up, especially defensively.
 
"They've got a lot to learn but they're talented," Huggins admitted. "De'Angelo is 6-6, long and he's got some ball skills and he can make some shots. Wes rebounds it. He's really athletic and he can step out and make shots. And Teddy finds ways to score. Unfortunately, so does his man, which is something we've got to fix."
 
Huggins will have two experienced players near the basket in sophomores Sagaba Konate and Maciej Bender. Konate gives West Virginia a rim protector it really hasn't had during the time Huggins has been here, and Bender has the same skill set that Nate Adrian provided to the top of West Virginia's press last year.
 
Konate averaged 4.1 points and 2.8 rebounds while blocking a team-best 53 shots, while the 6-foot-10-inch Bender got more minutes as the season wore on and has the ability to step out and hit outside shots.
 
"I couldn't name you one guy that hasn't put extra time in the gym and Sags is certainly one of those guys," Huggins said. "He's shooting the ball better, he's scoring better inside and he runs better. Physically, he's a lot stronger."
 
Former walk-on Logan Routt was awarded a scholarship earlier this fall and Huggins said he's going to play this season.
 
Routt, from Cameron, West Virginia, appeared in 11 games last year and is now in his third season in the program.
 
"He's worked hard," Huggins said. "He's changed his body. He's running better and he's doing so many things better."
 
Two other returning players who could give the team a boost are sophomore guards James Bolden and Chase Harler, particularly now that touted freshman Brandon Knapper is on the shelf after suffering a preseason knee injury.
 
Huggins indicated that he is not optimistic that the South Charleston resident will be available this season.
 
"I don't think they absolutely know but it doesn't look like it - four to six months, so there's a two-month difference there," he said.
 
The Mountaineers are facing a brutal schedule this season, possibly their toughest ever, starting right out of the gate with Texas A&M at Ramstein-Miesenbach AirBase in Germany on Friday, November 10.
 
Virginia and Pitt will be played in early December, and the Mountaineers also face Kentucky in the Big 12/SEC Challenge in Morgantown on Saturday, January 27.
 
"It's too hard," Huggins said. "We need to play Pitt. I think it's great for both schools. We have a series going with Virginia. We're going to play somebody in the Big 12/SEC Challenge and then they asked us if we would be the team that opens the season in college basketball. How do you say no to that? So, we're playing Texas A&M.
 
"I think the hard thing that our people haven't realized is you go through those games and then we're playing Long Beach State, who is picked to win their league. We're playing Fordham and they can beat you. Then we're going to Orlando and we're going to play at least two high majors and maybe three high majors," Huggins continued. "That's a lot of hard games. And that's before you start playing in the hardest league in the country.
 
"I think we're pretty good, but we better be because that's a hard, hard schedule," Huggins concluded.