Basketball Notebook
October 28, 2008 11:08 AM | General
October 28, 2008
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| Bob Huggins |
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Coach Bob Huggins admits his WVU basketball team is ahead of where it was last year at this time. That’s good. What’s not so good is that Huggins believes his team is going to have to make even more progress in order to hold up against a schedule loaded with Top 10 teams.
“When you’ve got four teams in the top 10 and you play two of those twice in our league it’s a much harder schedule then what it was a year ago,” Huggins said Monday afternoon. “It’s a much harder non-conference schedule and a much harder conference schedule. You hope those things help you. Sometimes it does and sometimes you get beat down. We have to make sure that we’re good enough not to get beat down.”
Huggins pointed out that West Virginia’s schedule is not only difficult but also is full of variety: pressing, up-tempo teams, zone teams, motion teams and so forth.
“We’re putting more things in,” he said. “We’re going to have to have more things and we’re going to have to be prepared for more things. We’re going to see zone early. People are going to press us early. There will be a lot of things to put in. You don’t want to get everything in and then not do anything right. We’re trying to put things in and then make sure we know what we’re doing.”
A little more than a week into fall practice, Huggins likes what he’s seen so far from his talented freshmen group, but he admits that he will have to live with some of their mistakes early on.
“The young guys are still lost but they’ve got an idea. If we played today we could put them into the game. A year ago I don’t think we could have put anyone in the game at this time,” he said.
“We try to show them what we’re doing and we try and break it down. You break it down and they kind of understand it and then you go back to adding more things to it they get lost like most young guys do,” said Huggins.
The veteran coach remains concerned about West Virginia’s lack of size in the paint. Just one player (Dee Proby) stands taller than 6-10, and 6-foot-9-inch forward Devin Ebanks is more of a wing player than an inside player.
“It makes it hard when you play against guys like (Luke) Harangody and (Hasheem) Thabeet - when you play against the guys that Louisville has. It’s a lot of work,” Huggins said. “We have got to extend the passing lanes and make the passing lanes longer so that they are not able to feed the post as freely as they want to. It’s not anything that is not insurmountable we just have to do a good job at it.
“We’re long but we’re not terribly athletic,” Huggins said. “It’s hard to guard a 7-3 guy with a 6-6 guy. We’re going to have to do it by committee, we’re going to have to play great team defense and we’re going to have to make the passing lanes longer.”
Huggins sees a Big East Conference this year that could get as many as 10 or 11 teams into the NCAA Tournament. He believes the league is that strong.
“When you’ve got four teams in the top 10 and seven in the top 25 and we probably could have 10 or 11, it’s going to come down to making free throws in games, getting a key rebound or making a play at the end of the game,” Huggins said. “I think a lot of games are going to come down to that.”
West Virginia’s first exhibition game will take place on Saturday, Nov. 8, against Mountain State at 1 pm. The Mountaineers will also have a closed scrimmage at the University of Virginia this weekend.
Briefly:
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| Will Thomas |
“Will has been a lot better, particularly defensively,” Huggins said. “He has been a lot more physical and he’s playing with a lot more confidence. He is like everybody else, it’s up to Will. We’re going to play the guys that can win for us.”
Huggins says Thomas is not completely back from his injury.
“If you saw the dunk contest at least he’s getting over the rim and playing above the rim like he did in high school,” Huggins said. “He’s gotten a lot stronger. He’s done a really good job in the weight room.”
“We’re not near to where we were defensively at the start of last season. Offensively we’ve got a lot of stuff in but we’re not very good at very much of it,” he said. “We haven’t spent a lot of time on zone offense and we haven’t spent a lot of time on press break. We have spent no time on out-of-bounds plays and special situations that we’ve got to get to here.”
The coach is also still seeking consistency from some of the newer players.
“Da’Sean (Butler) has been very consistent. Alex (Ruoff) has been consistent and Joe (Mazzulla) has been consistent. The next guy after that has probably been John Flowers,” Huggins said. “Those four new guys have all had their moments when they’ve played pretty well but moments get you beat. We have to do it on a consistent basis and that’s just going to take some time.
“They are going to make some mistakes. I realize that and we’re going to have to live with some but we’re going to have to fix them as fast as we can.
