Basketball Notebook
December 09, 2007 02:33 PM | General
December 9, 2007
UPDATED BASKETBALL STATS
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – It’s difficult not to get too far ahead of ourselves with Joe Alexander - and Bob Huggins will make sure that we don’t - but Alexander is doing some things on the basketball court that people around here haven’t seen in a long, long time.
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| Joe Alexander throws down two of his career-high 26 points on Saturday agaisnt Duquesne.
AP photo |
The 6-foot-8-inch, 230-pound junior can score on either side of the floor, he can score off the dribble, he can knock down the 3 and now Huggins is teaching Alexander how to score with his back to the basket.
Several times on Saturday night against Duquesne’s 6-10 shot-blocker Shawn James Alexander went right at him, either using the glass from the blocks or going straight over top him. Once on a set play at mid-court Alexander took a pass behind the 3-point line, took three hard dribbles toward the basket and went up and stuffed it right in James’ face.
Alexander may have been capable of doing these things eight months ago, but nobody outside of practice has really seen it. Several times I happened to glance down at Jerry West after a move Alexander made or a rebound he grabbed and you could see West nodding with approval, pointing something out to his WVU teammate Willie Akers.
Remember, West is the NBA guy that discovered Kobie Bryant as a sophomore in high school. Bob Valvano broke down Alexander’s game for a video segment on ESPN.com, pointing out many of Alexander’s positive attributes.
And ESPN’s Jimmy Dykes made several comments about Alexander’s athleticism during West Virginia’s 88-59 victory over Auburn on Wednesday night. The more Alexander plays like this the more people will notice.
“Joe wants to be good,” said Huggins Saturday night. “It’s just a matter of breaking old habits and creating news ones and sometimes it’s harder to break old ones than it is to create new ones. What I’m talking about is he shot shots falling away in the first half.
“Somebody as talented as him doesn’t need to fall away,” Huggins said. “I think you saw in the second half he caught it and shot it right on 6-10, 6-11 guys. He’s got so much ability and we’ve got to continue to get it out of him. I tell him he’s got to do his part.”
Alexander scored a career-high 26 points on 9 of 19 shooting against the Dukes. He also grabbed six rebounds and handed out five assists.
“It’s his career high and considering he didn’t play real well in the first half … think what he could do if we could get him to go a whole game,” Huggins said.
Alexander is coming off a 17-point effort against Auburn, and a 19-point, 10-rebound double-double last Saturday against Winthrop boosting his season scoring average to 15.8 points per game. Alexander is also grabbing a team best 7.0 rebounds per contest.
Huggins is asking Alexander to do a lot.
“We ask him to break pressure. He does. He didn’t in the first half very well but in the second half he did a great job against their pressure. We ask him to rebound the ball for us and I thought in the second half he did a heck of a job,” Huggins said. “We ask him to guard the opponents’ best post player and he’s done that. Then we run plays for him to get him to score.
“It’s not like we aren’t asking him to do a whole bunch – I understand that we are – but I wouldn’t ask him to do a whole bunch if I didn’t think he was capable of doing it,” Huggins said.
Briefly:
“John Flowers is getting better and better. I think John gave us really good minutes,” Huggins said.
“The second positive is that we played a lot of minutes without Darris on the floor that we haven’t done all year. We weren’t as good as we were without him on the floor but we survived,” Huggins said. “I would just as soon have him on the floor.
“He’s a 6-7 guy that is long and jumps a little bit and I’m sure in high school he kind of stood in front of the rim,” Huggins said. “You can’t do that at this level. There are a lot of things for John to learn at the defensive end and I think in high school he just went down and put people on his back and scored. He can’t do that at this level consistently so he has to be able to do other things.
“The thing I like about John is he works and John really does care. He wants to be a good player and he wants to help the team,” Huggins said.
“If you’re the opposition you’re looking at it and you say who don’t we key on? And we all know Darris is capable of doing that, too,” Huggins said. “I think Wellington is getting better and better all of the time. Wellington got himself into foul trouble again but I think he’s getting better.
“I think Darris can take big shots, I think Alex can take big shots, I think Joe can take big shots and I think Da’Sean can take big shots,” Huggins said. “I think they are all capable of taking big shots – it depends upon who is open or what kind of mismatch we can get.”
“Our biggest challenge is we have to get better defensive so we don’t get into foul trouble. And there are so many more things we can do offensively,” Huggins said. “We haven’t scratched the surface. I got a call from Bobby Bolen at Mountain State after the Auburn game and he said, ‘You didn’t run all of that stuff against us.’ I said, ‘We weren’t ready to run it yet.’
“You have to learn the basic things before you can move on,” Huggins said. “We’re moving on but we’re moving on at a snail’s pace and that’s at both ends of the floor. You’ve got to make sure you do it right. You don’t want to look back and say we can’t do this and we can’t do that because we didn’t spend enough time getting the fundamental things right to start with.”
Following the UMBC game, the Mountaineers have a pair of road games at 4-6 Radford and at 0-8 Canisius in Buffalo before Christmas.
West Virginia’s final two non-conference games are against 7-3 Oklahoma and 4-2 Marshall, both in Charleston, W.Va.
