Men's Basketball: WVU Bucks the Broncos
November 24, 2006 07:51 PM | General
November 24, 2006
BOX SCORE
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| Darris Nichols |
ORLANDO – West Virginia scored the first 16 points of the game and cruised to an easy 79-54 victory over Western Michigan in the semifinals of the Old Spice Classic at the Milk House in Orlando Saturday evening.
Darris Nichols scored a career-high 18 points and senior center Rob Summers added 10 points on 5 of 5 shooting to help the Mountaineers improve to 5-0 on the season.
“This is a little more of what I envision from Darris Nichols: more of a scorer who can play the point,” said West Virginia coach John Beilein. “Not a point guard that never looks at the basket and I was proud of him tonight.”
West Virginia’s 1-3-1 zone took Western Michigan out of the game early, holding the Broncos to just 11 first-half points. It is the fewest points allowed by a Mountaineer defense since 1951 when WVU limited Salem College to 10 points.
Western Michigan, which beat Virginia Tech 71-68 yesterday, committed 20 of its 28 turnovers in the first half and was only able to get off nine shot attempts before intermission.
West Virginia’s biggest lead of the game was 43, 60-17, midway through the second half.
Frank Young contributed 13 points after scoring a career-high 21 against Montana Friday night and now shows eight 3-point baskets for the tournament. Alex Ruoff had a tremendous all-around game, scoring a career-high 11 points to go with eight assists and four steals.
“Right now Alex Ruoff is doing an incredible job at the two spot and Rob and Jamie (Smalligan) are really doing a good job inside,” said Beilein. “When we had Kevin in there it was 38 minutes of Kevin running back and forth and that’s hard.
“Because we’re platooning those two they have an awful lot of energy to keep the ball out of the post,” Beilein said. “I do like the energy we have when we’re playing.”
Summers and Smalligan combined to give West Virginia 18 points from the center position. In five games, Summers is now 12 of 16 from the field.
Freshman Wellington Smith came off the bench to tally 11 points, nine coming in the second half.
West Virginia’s leading scorer Joe Alexander, who had 18 in last night’s victory, managed just one point before fouling out.
“You look at the box score and you see that Joe Alexander had just one point and that shows how young we are,” said Beilein. “It’s just a matter of us finding out about ourselves every day.”
The Mountaineers shot 49 percent for the game (25 of 51) and was 12 of 25 from 3-point distance. West Virginia hit 17 of 24 from the free throw line and had 23 assists on 25 baskets.
“That was good for us but we got a little bit away from it at the end but we’re human up being up 35-40 points,” Beilein said. “I saw some of the freshmen and they said, ‘The heck with this I’m going to put my head down and just go to the basket.’ But we’re learning.”
The Mountaineers have now forced their opponents into committing 119 turnovers in five games and has not allowed a team to reach 60 points yet this season. Western Michigan (2-3) came into the game averaging more than 70 points per game.
Andre Ricks led Western Michigan with 10 points.
West Virginia will spend Saturday touring Walt Disney World before facing Arkansas on Sunday. West Virginia will play the 4-0 Razorbacks in the championship game Sunday night at approximately 8 pm on ESPN2.
Arkansas knocked off Marist, 73-64 earlier today.
“We’re going to be kids tomorrow, we’re going to let them go to the theme park,” Beilein said. “Most of our prep for Arkansas will be Sunday. It’s probably going to be 8 o’clock at night and we just need to rest a little bit tomorrow.
“The coaches will watch a little bit of tape and then we will have a walk-through on Sunday.”
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