Wildcats Tall Order for WVU
March 24, 2015 08:04 PM | General
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Forward Devin Williams will be going up against the tallest front line in college basketball on Thursday night in Cleveland when West Virginia takes on top-ranked Kentucky.
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| All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo |
CLEVELAND - Back in the day there used to be a science fiction show on TV called Land of the Giants.
A spaceship named the Spindrift was on a sub-orbital flight from Los Angeles to London when it encountered a space storm and was transported to a mysterious planet 12 times larger than normal. The planet didn’t have a name but if it did there is no doubt it would have been called Kentucky.
Only in Kentucky are the guards 6-6, the wings 6-10’ish and the 7-foot centers nimble enough to run around with the little guys. They get them so big in Kentucky these days that the Wildcats are taller than all but one NBA team – the Portland Trailblazers.
Wildcat guards Aaron and Andrew Harrison are the two shortest players in the starting lineup – and they are both 6-6. Starting forward Trey Lyles is 6-10, the other starting forward Karl Anthony-Townes is 6-11 and the third starting forward, Willie Cauley-Stein, stands 7 feet tall.
Kentucky has another 7-footer and two 6-9 guys coming off the bench. There is a fourth big, too - 6-foot-8-inch Alex Poythress - but he is out for the season with a knee injury.
According to Kentucky’s basketball notes, the Wildcats’ 13 scholarship players have an average wingspan of 6-10 with five possessing a wingspan of 7 feet or greater. If you were to line up all 13 of them on the court and have them extend their arms they would nearly reach the other end of the floor.
Kentucky is so big the players are now calling their shorts talls.
West Virginia (25-9) has faced some pretty big teams in the past – some of those Georgetown squads when the elder John Thompson was on the bench immediately coming to mind. Thompson’s bigs were usually an inch or two taller than what they were listed in the program, and probably 20 or 30 pounds heavier, too.
Connecticut had impressive size when Jim Calhoun had it going in Storrs and Jim Boeheim’s Syracuse teams were usually big. This year’s Texas team is in that category as well.
But none of them were this big.
Yes, the Mountaineers have quite a mountain to scale on Thursday night when they face the 36-0 Wildcats in the Midwest Regional semifinals in Cleveland.
Coach Bob Huggins has been around the game for a long time as a player and coach and he can’t recall facing a team similar to the one his guys are going up against on Thursday night.
“Probably the closest one was Kentucky in 2010,” he said. “We led by one at halftime and we didn’t have a two-point field goal. I think every time we took it inside the 3 we got our shots blocked. Other than that, I can’t remember anybody who would be as close to this team than that one.”
The Kentucky team West Virginia faced in the regional finals in Syracuse back in 2010 was pretty big, but not nearly as big as this one.
Forward DeMarcus Cousins was 6-11 and weighed 270 pounds, and forward Patrick Patterson was 6-9, but Kentucky also started three guards that year – 6-7 Darius Miller, 6-4 John Wall and 6-1 point guard Eric Bledsoe.
Going back into time – way back to the late 1960s when Land of the Giants was still on the tube – West Virginia once faced UCLA when the Bruins had gigantic 7-foot-1 center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Also on that team were 6-9 forward Steve Patterson, 6-8 forward Sidney Wicks and 6-7 leaper Curtis Rowe - all long and lean players - but those guys couldn’t block out the sun the way these Kentucky players do today.
Perhaps even more concerning to Huggins than the Wildcats’ impressive size advantage is the experienced players Coach John Calipari has on his roster this year.
In the past, Kentucky was known as the place where the best high school basketball players in America stopped off for a year before moving on to the NBA.
Well, this year’s Kentucky team has six players on its roster with at least 60 games worth of college experience under their belts.
“This may be the first time in a long time that Cal has had some very integral pieces back,” Huggins pointed out. “His guards are back and they’re both 6-6 and long. They’ve had a year with John and they understand what he wants done.”
Then there is Cauley-Stein, the Lou Gehrig of Kentucky basketball who will be playing his 103rd game for the Wildcats on Thursday night.
“I believe this is Willie Cauley-Stein’s third year if I’m not mistaken and if you have to point to one guy who is their best defender I would say it’s him,” said Huggins. “I think everybody is in agreement he can guard four or all five positions. He changes so many shots and they switch all of the ball screens because he can really move his feet and guard on the perimeter.
“I think there was a base there that maybe they didn’t have before. When you have some guys that understand they can kind of help the other guys. That’s very beneficial,” said Huggins.
Defending size is one thing, but scoring against it is something else entirely. Huggins said he isn’t sure what else he can do offensively to counter Kentucky’s great size and length. The Wildcats are allowing 53.9 points per game, have blocked 248 shots and their opponents are shooting just 35.1 percent, which is No. 1 in the country for defensive field goal percentage.
“I told our guys during the Maryland game we can’t get into a 3-point shooting contest because we’re not going to win,” Huggins explained. “We’ve got to find ways to be able to attack the basket and be able to get it to the rim.”
And doing that against these guys will be a tall task, indeed.
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