WVU-Washington Connections
March 25, 2010 11:20 AM | General
(11:21 am)
 |
||
| Bob Huggins |
There are three West Virginia-Washington connections for tonight’s NCAA tournament Sweet 16 game in Syracuse, N.Y.
Da’Sean Butler and Quincy Pondexter played for Team USA last summer in World University Games, Truck Bryant, Devin Ebanks and Isaiah Thomas played together at the Reebok U. camp and Bob Huggins and Lorenzo Romar both coached in Conference USA when Huggins was at Cincinnati and Romar was at St. Louis.
Romar made an interesting analogy concerning Huggins’ teams at Cincinnati, Kansas State and now at West Virginia.
“Over the years my mother moved to different homes, and I don’t care what the home looked like on the outside, eventually the inside looked exactly like the other houses,” Romar said. “She decorated it the same way. You knew exactly what to look for in each house after a while.
“And I don’t care where Coach Huggins is, after a while his teams start to look the same way and you can see this team is starting to look like the teams he had at Cincinnati – long, athletic guys that just play extremely hard, are mentally tough, and just come out and get after you.” Huggins admitted in his 28 years of coaching he has never been able to assemble a team to his ideal specifications.
“I wish I could do that,” he said. “I’ve never been in a place where we could select guys. We always had to get the best guys we could and work to their strengths. We pressed when we I had guys that could really run, and then when I got Danny Fortson, if somebody beat him, Danny would trip him or tackle him. I didn’t see a consensus first-team All-American sitting on the bench as helping me much.
“We kind of got away from that and ran a lot more sets for Danny,” Huggins said. “And we’ve changed through the years because we kind of have to. I would have liked to sometime in my career have had that opportunity to just go out and say, ‘I like that guy. That’s the guy I want.’ But it’s never worked out that way.”
Other notes from Wednesday’s news conference ...
“I think it’s hard when you try to put new guys into situations and I think people have to understand their roles,” Huggins said. “I think that’s probably the hardest thing we do in coaching is get guys to do what they can do well because seemingly everybody wants to prove all of the things they can’t do rather than the things they do well. That takes some time, obviously.”
 |
||
| Lorenzo Romar |
Romar was asked about the Pac-10’s difficulties this year getting only two teams into the NCAA tournament and only one in the NIT.
“There were a couple of unfortunate losses in the non –conference schedule early that didn’t look very good for the league,” he said. “At the time some players were ineligible and some players were hurt. Once that happened, the Pac 10 kind of got labeled the rest of the year.
“And the league was young,” he added. “Twenty one players went to the NBA in the last two years. The league had to grow up.”
“There’s not a whole lot that people can throw at us that we haven’t seen before,” said Huggins. “We guard everything from the Princeton offense to people trying to score 100 points in a game. I don’t know what it would be that we wouldn’t be prepared for. And then on top of that, I think the non-conference schedule that we’ve played, we’ve certainly seen a variety of styles.”
Romar, too, was asked about facing varying styles.
“Half our league slows it down,” he said. “So whether we’re going to be effective or not it remains to be seen, but we have been in many games where the pace was slowed.”
“Virtually everything,” Huggins said. “We run the same man offense that he ran. We ran the same zone offense until a year ago when we kind of made some changes, although that’s still a part of what we do against a zone. A lot of what he did and stressed defensively we do.
“Obviously I had to change some things but I think the core is basically what he did, what I kind of grew up around from the time I was old enough to walk,” he said. “Sometimes when I don’t understand things I call him.”
“It’s very difficult,” Mazzulla said. “I’ve never been to a Sweet 16 game before. I don’t really know what to expect so all I have to do is try and go out there and just play as hard as I can.”
Actually, Mazzulla played in West Virginia’s 79-75 overtime loss to Xavier in the 2008 Sweet 16, scoring 10 points and handing out five assists.
Clarence Ramsey scored 23, Ray Price had 22 and center Larry Pounds scored 18 points and grabbed eight boards for Washington. Warren Baker led West Virginia with 25 points and nine rebounds.
SI.com’s Stewart Mandell wrote that tonight’s Kentucky-Cornell game will feature three future lottery picks playing against their future financial advisors.
The dreaded Blue Mist (Kentucky’s large following of blue-clad supporters) was not evident Wednesday afternoon. In fact, the word Wednesday was that not all of Kentucky’s allotted tickets for the Sweet 16 were used.
The attendance figure I heard being thrown around for both sessions tonight was about 22,000.
