Road Show
January 07, 2007 10:02 PM | General
January 8, 2007
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – We now know West Virginia is a very good basketball team at home, going 9-0 so far this year at the WVU Coliseum. On Tuesday night, we’re going to find out what kind of team the Mountaineers are on the road.
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| West Virginia coach John Beilein rolls up his sleeves during his team's 73-46 victory over St. John's Saturday at the WVU Coliseum.
AP photo |
West Virginia faces 13-2 Notre Dame at the Joyce Center in South Bend in a game that will be televised nationally on ESPN2. WVU coach John Beilein is anxious to see how his team performs in a hostile environment.
“We’ve only really had one true road game with Duquesne and this is Notre Dame and they’re nationally ranked,” Beilein said after Saturday’s 73-46 win over St. John’s. “We’ll do the normal stuff with the loud music and really make it a tougher environment -- try and simulate what the environment is at Notre Dame.”
West Virginia’s previous forays away from the Coliseum have been in benign atmospheres. The Mountaineers played three games on a neutral site in the Old Spice Classic in Orlando, Fla., beating Montana and Western Michigan before falling to Arkansas in the championship game.
The Mountaineers also played North Carolina State before a partisan crowd at the Charleston Civic Center on Dec. 6. The non-conference schedule this season was designed to help develop a completely remodeled team without five of its top six players from a year ago.
“I’m not downgrading my team but if we were to have started out at Connecticut and at Villanova we wouldn’t be all la-la right now,” Beilein noted. “We would have been la-la because we would have been 1-2 right now. Playing on the road is really hard especially for a young group.”
The Mountaineers (13-1, 3-0) have won eight in a row after suffering a 71-64 loss to Arkansas and Beilein has been hedging his bets the entire time. The veteran coach has been reluctant to heap too much praise on a young team that has won only once this year in an opposing team’s gym.
“We obviously had some guarantee games that really worked out well,” Beilein said. “When you’re rebuilding a team my first thought is that if you’re playing the really good teams and you’re playing at home you might play your tail off and lose by one or two. Then you go and play the teams that are more in your boat and you might lose by two and now you’re plagued with a bad season.”
But West Virginia was able to win all three of its Big East home games to start the season, including its two biggest triumphs of the year so far against Connecticut and Villanova – two NCAA Elite Eight teams from a year ago. However, both are extremely young: the Huskies had five players from last year’s roster drafted by NBA teams and Villanova had three.
“When I saw those two teams coming in first it worries you. You play your tail off and lose by two and now you’re 1-2 or 0-3 at home,” Beilein said. “We’re 3-0 and now most of our games are on the road. Six of the next eight are away from here and that’s the only thing I know about the schedule because I had to do the travel.”
The Villanova victory was especially taxing. The Mountaineers jumped out to a 22-point halftime lead against the Wildcats and then spent a good portion of the second half simply trying to get the ball over the mid-court line against Villanova’s full-court pressure.
“We thought in the Villanova game that we were running the coaches’ plays and not trusting ourselves to be players,” Beilein said. “There were gaps that we could have exploited that we didn’t use. We did the same thing three years ago against St. John’s when they came in here. We were 10-1 and we were just beaten by Villanova by 40 and we were just tentative.”
West Virginia can’t afford to be tentative offensively against an angry Notre Dame team coming off its worst loss of the year last Saturday at Georgetown. The Irish were held to just 48 points by the Hoyas after entering the contest averaging a Big East-best 88 points per game. Six different times this year Notre Dame has scored 50 points or more in a half.
Compare that to West Virginia, which is holding teams to a conference-low 51.1 points per game. The Mountaineers’ 1-3-1 zone defense limited Villanova to 56 points on Wednesday and St. John’s to 46 last Saturday. Connecticut's Jim Calhoun and Villanova's Jay Wright both made it a point to compliment West Virginia’s improved defensive play during their post-game press conferences.
“One of the hardest things is that they’re real long,” said St. John’s guard Eugene Lawrence after Saturday’s game. “They have a 6-8 guy at the top of the zone. They really get their arms out wide and deflect passes and it’s hard to see over top them.”
West Virginia is probably going to need another stellar defensive effort against Notre Dame on Tuesday night if it hopes to knock off the Irish in South Bend. The Mountaineers are winless at Notre Dame under Beilein, losing twice in 2003 and 2004.
