Growing Pains
January 13, 2007 02:44 PM | General
January 13, 2007
BOX SCORE
MILWAUKEE – No. 21 West Virginia is finding out that life on the road in the Big East can be difficult at times. Dominic James scored 21 points and David Cubillan added 14 off the bench to lead Marquette to an 81-63 victory over the Mountaineers Saturday afternoon at the Bradley Center.
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| Jamie Smalligan came off the bench to score 10 points and grab five rebounds for West Virginia Saturday against Marquette.
AP photo |
“Marquette is really good,” said West Virginia coach John Beilein. “Our lack of experience really showed.”
For West Virginia, it was the first double-digit loss since Nov. 22, 2005, when it lost 8066 to Kentucky in Kansas City. It was the worst conference road loss since falling by 28 at Villanova on Jan. 5, 2005.
“I don’t want to put it on us as much as it was Marquette,” Beilein said. "They’ve got a good team and things snowballed very quickly for us today on a couple of occasions and that was very costly.”
The Mountaineers (13-3, 3-2) had a hard time finding their shooting stroke, making 5 of 23 from 3-point range for 21.7 percent. Overall, West Virginia was 19 of 49 for 38.8 percent.
Marquette shot 53 percent for the game including 57 percent from 3-point distance (8 of 14). The Golden Eagles came into today’s game shooting 44.8 percent overall and 31.8 percent from 3.
Wesley Mathews contributed 13 points and Jerel McNeal added 11 for Marquette, now 15-4, 2-2. Marquette grabbed 14 offensive rebounds and held a 40-26 advantage on the glass.
“They have a very, very veteran team that has been in these wars time and again and was an NCAA tournament team with four out of five starters back,” Beilein said. “We at times looked like a team that had one out of five starters back and that should be expected at times this year.”
West Virginia committed 17 turnovers. In two Big East road losses to Notre Dame and Marquette, the Mountaineers have shot a combined 42 of 110 for 38.1 percent.
“Those sophomores that haven’t played a lot with each game they gain more confidence of what we have to do,” Beilein said. “The freshmen are freshmen: it’s going to happen. We’ve got to take small baby steps with the freshmen but Al (Ruoff) and Joe (Alexander) are getting so many quality minutes. I think both of them are going to be much better players than they are playing right now.”
Frank Young led West Virginia with 11 points on 3 of 8 shooting from 3. Jamie Smalligan came off the bench to score 10 points and grab five rebounds. Smalligan played 18 minutes due to early foul trouble by starting center Rob Summers.
“The first thing we talked about at the beginning of the game was that Rob and Darris (Nichols) need to stay out of foul trouble because they were going to attack us a little bit,” Beilein said. “Although Jamie had some obvious tough plays, he did score 10 points for us and he did get five rebounds. He was competing out there.”
The Mountaineers return to the Coliseum where they are 9-0 this year to face South Florida on Wednesday night at 7 pm.
