WVU Hoops Outlook Bright
April 08, 2015 01:21 PM | General
 |
|
| Bob Huggins |
It was another disappointing ending to a two-year stretch that saw Coach Bob Huggins’ Mountaineer teams win just 30 of 65 games – easily the worst two-year period of his long and very successful coaching career.
Well, a lot has happened since then.
A LOT.
First, some key members on that 2014 team chose to part ways with WVU, opening up a couple of roster spots for some new players.
Then, Huggins sought out old friend Kevin Mackey last summer to pick his brain on the full-court pressure defensive system that he used to run at Cleveland State in the late 1980s.
“My question was, how much do we have to work on and how much time is it going to take?” Huggins said a few weeks ago. “He said, ‘Huggs you get to the mid-line. You guys pressure the ball and you’ve got people built to run and jump.’ And he said I don’t think it’s going to take that long and so we put it in.”
Huggins’ decision to change the way his team plays – and the willingness of his players to buy into it – has really changed the outlook of West Virginia basketball.
Sometimes it never hurts to do a little reinventing every now and again (all of the great ones do it, including Mike Krzyzewski, whose willingness to recruit “one and done” players at Duke helped him get his fifth national title earlier this week) and Huggins’ coaching epiphany may end up having a lasting impact on Mountaineer basketball.
For example, think back to the early 2000s when West Virginia football coach Rich Rodriguez ordered his defensive coaches to go down to Wake Forest and learn the 3-3-stack defense. We all know how well that turned out for West Virginia football.
Well, the same thing may be happening right now in the men’s basketball program.
“I had never played like this,” admitted Huggins. “At Cincinnati we pressed and we were probably the best pressing team in the country in ’92 and ’93. But it was three-quarter court, and different trap areas and those kind of things, so I’m learning and they’re learning as we go.”
West Virginia is still less than a year into this way of playing basketball so Huggins and his coaching staff are still tweaking their roster to fit this style of play.
But if the last six months are any indication of what we have to look forward to in the near future then it may be the single most important schematic alteration to take place in the basketball program since the mid-1950s when Fred Schaus adopted Neal Baisi’s zone press defense, or at least since the mid-2000s when John Beilein brought his motion offensive system to Morgantown.
Think about what West Virginia was able to accomplish in 2015:
- An eight-win improvement from the 17 wins WVU produced in 2014 to the 25 victories it had in 2015 – with almost an entirely revamped roster.
- A return to the Top 25 in both polls. West Virginia finished 20th in the AP poll, the 14th time the Mountaineers have accomplished that in school history and the third time under Huggins; and 18th in the USA Today/ESPN Coaches’ poll, only the sixth time in school history WVU ended the year ranked in that particular poll and the third time under Huggins.
- West Virginia winning five times against nationally ranked teams, including its NCAA Tournament third-round victory over 12th-ranked Maryland to reach its sixth Sweet 16 since 1998.
The Mountaineers this year matched the 2005 team’s school record of 14 games played against nationally ranked foes.
As a matter of fact, the 85 nationally ranked teams that Huggins has faced since his return to WVU in 2007 equals the total number of nationally ranked opponents the Mountaineers played during a 34-year period from 1950 to 1984 (85).
Think about that for a minute: Eighty-five ranked teams in eight years compared to 85 ranked teams during a 34-year span of time that includes all of those great Fred Schaus and George King teams that dominated the polls in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
That’s pretty remarkable.
- West Virginia leading the country in steals with an average of 10.7 per game. The Mountaineers also finished first in the specialty categories of offensive rebounding and total steals – the first time ever a Mountaineer basketball team has led the country in ANY statistical category.
That’s another pretty remarkable achievement for this year’s team.
- After finishing in the bottom half of the Big 12 standings in 2013 and 2014, West Virginia was one questionable call at Kansas away from winning a share of the Big 12 regular season title with Kansas and Iowa State.
Five of the Mountaineers’ 10 losses this season came against Iowa State and Baylor, which finished below WVU in the final coaches’ poll released yesterday.
- Coach Bob Huggins being named the 2015 Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year, one of just three times in school history that a WVU’s men’s basketball coach has been honored nationally.
Gale Catlett was named Basketball Times Coach of the Year in 1982 and Fred Schaus was named UPI Coach of the Year in 1959 after leading the Mountaineers to the national championship game against Cal.
It is the sixth time in Huggins’ coaching career that he has been recognized as national coach of the year – five of those coming while he was at Cincinnati.
In short, some pretty impressive stuff when you consider where this program was last spring in the minds of outsiders.
Furthermore, there are just two seniors who played on this year’s team (guards Juwan Staten and Gary Browne), meaning 74 percent of West Virginia’s scoring is returning for 2016.
Pair that with a promising incoming recruiting class more tailored to the way Huggins wants to play and the future indeed looks very bright for Mountaineer basketball.
“I think we put West Virginia basketball back on the map,” Staten said following the Mountaineers’ Sweet 16 loss to Kentucky. “Coach Huggs has always had great teams – teams that are used to being in the NCAA Tournament and used to winning games.
“For a while we got away from that so just to get back to this spot – to be in the Sweet 16 – means that we've got a special thing. We only have a couple seniors graduating, so the bulk of the team is coming back,” Staten added. “You can definitely look forward to them being in the tournament for years to come.”
Perhaps it could all add up to another Final Four run, which Huggins’ Mountaineers once achieved in 2010.
And who would have ever thought that was possible a year ago when West Virginia’s season ended in Washington, D.C.?
Steve Sabins | May 11
Monday, May 11
Alumni Series | Violet Hewett
Friday, May 01
SWIM: What it Means to Represent West Virginia
Wednesday, April 29
SWIM: What it Means to Become a Mountaineer
Wednesday, April 29
