Men's Basketball: WVU Wins at Radford
December 19, 2007 10:43 PM | General
December 19, 2007
BOX SCORE
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| Darris Nichols |
RADFORD, Va. – Bob Huggins showed Wednesday night why he is one of the best basketball coaches in the business. He showed why he has won 599 games, beats ranked teams on a consistent basis and usually blows out inferior opponents on the road.
He showed all of that before and during his post-game radio press conference that was delayed for several minutes while he took some extra time to drive home important points to his 9-1 and 24th-ranked West Virginia basketball team. There were some things that happened in the game tonight that he just couldn’t dismiss.
While this was going on, WVU’s play-by-play man Tony Caridi had completely gone through the entire stat sheet and had moved on to West Coast scores he dug up on his BlackBerry when Huggs came out of the locker room.
“I don’t feel very good about it,” Huggins said of his team’s road victory at Radford. “We had to take two starters out to have a chance to win the game. Why guys would come in that spaced out and not want to play is beyond me? The reality is our field goal percentage defense continues to climb because we’ve gone from being a pretty decent half-court defensive team to not guarding anybody.
“Defense is about giving great effort. It’s about five guys working together. We’ve got four guys pressuring and wanting to do something and one guy stands and let’s the guy reverse the ball, relieve pressure and breaks you down,” Huggins said. “When it continues to happen the other guys are like, why would I do this? This guy isn’t doing anything.”
Huggins dug deeper.
“I was really frustrated with the last game (home win over UMBC) and I tried to be positive because people say I’m not positive enough,” he said. “The only difference between those people that say I’m not positive enough and me is I’ve done this for 30 years and I know what’s coming. We go play in the Big East like that and we don’t have a chance to beat anybody.
“It’s not real hard to figure out who wants to play,” Huggins explained. “If you’ve got guys up there standing up and staring at the ball then they’re not ready to play. If you’ve got guys standing on offense or a guy who catches the ball and he’s surprised he caught the ball and he can’t jump because he doesn’t have his knees bent and his behind down and he throws it up short … we had two of our better players not get one over the rim all day because they didn’t have their behind down.”
The coach then moved on to his team’s defense that permitted Radford to make 31 of 66 field goal attempts, many on dribble drives toward the basket.
“If we can’t guard those guys how in the world can we guard anybody in the Big East? They just took the ball and beat us on the bounce. I thought our rotations were bad. We didn’t rebound the ball. We get out-rebounded 39-35,” he said.
Huggins switched to offense.
“To be a good offensive team you have to have somebody who can make shots. To be a really good offensive team you have to have somebody that score with their back to the basket. You have to have somebody who can drive by somebody. We have no one so we rely on jump shots,” Huggins said. “We have to rely on getting things out of offense.”
A couple of individual plays really stood out tonight to Huggins as well.
“We have a guy and somehow we throw the ball to him down there - why I have no idea. They throw him the ball and there are two guys on him and he tries to shoot it,” he said. “The guy grabs the ball and just slams it. He should have slammed it on top of his head and maybe he would have thought, maybe I shouldn’t have shot that. That dumbfounds me. I played the game a long time. I just can’t imagine turning like there is no one there; and there’s a 6-8 guy with long arms and thinking you’re going to shoot the ball over top of him? At that time we had made them go man and we had back cut them twice and made a 3.
Huggins’ mind then drifted back to his days coaching at Cincinnati.
“Smart guys make the game easy. When NBA scouts would watch Danny Fortson they used to say he makes the game easy. He shot 60 percent for his career. He didn’t take hard shots and he didn’t do things he couldn’t do,” Huggins said. “You never saw Dan trying to dribble the ball between his legs trying to make a spin move.
“You didn’t see him out there jacking up 3s. He was what he was. He spent 11 years in the NBA and he made, what, 100 millions dollars? We’ve got guys that don’t want to make the game easy. They want to get into how difficult can I make it? I say to them, you look like a fool. You don’t look good. Why would you do that? It continues to persist and we’ve got to fix it.”
Incidentally, West Virginia won the game by 30 points, 90-60.
“This is Fool’s Gold. We’re 9-1 and it is Fool’s Gold. We’re getting ready to play some teams now,” Huggins said.
Darris Nichols made a triumphant return to his hometown, being recognized before the game and then scoring a career-high 23 points on 7 of 11 shooting. He was 7 of 10 from 3-point distance.
“We screwed him up,” Huggins said. “(Assistant coach) Larry (Harrison) was telling me he needed one more 3 to break or tie a record and we had him take two 3s so he ends up 7 for 10 and he would have been 7 for 8 if we wouldn’t have done that. I wanted to give him an opportunity to break it here at home.
“That’s a guy that stands for the right things. You know every day what you’re going to get from Darris Nichols. If there is an example of what to be like on our team it’s that guy. He brings it every day.
“They don’t understand why I get upset. I get upset because I don’t want Darris Nichols spending his senior year getting pounded,” Huggins continued. “I want him to win and have a great experience.”
Alex Ruoff constributed 23, Da’Sean Butler scored 14 and Joe Mazzulla and John Flowers added 10 each.
Amir Johnson and Kenny Thomas scored 16 each for the Highlanders, now 4-9.
“We came in here today like let’s just get this over with,” Huggins said. “We didn’t have any enthusiasm. You can’t do anything in life without enthusiasm. If they don’t get it we’re going to make it so hard on them that they’re going to say he’s crazy man and I’m going to play hard so I don’t have to go through that.
“I don’t want to be like that.”
Next up for West Virginia is Canisius in Buffalo on Saturday afternoon. A victory will give Huggins number 600 for his career.
