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Williams Has Earned His Points ... And Rebounds
February 14, 2016 10:44 PM | Men's Basketball
One, two, five, 100, 500, 1,000 … those numbers hold little value to West Virginia’s Devin Williams, that is unless you are talking about rebounds.
We’ve all played with guys who knew exactly how many points they scored at any given moment in a game - the guys you usually avoided picking when choosing up sides in rec games or playing on the asphalt down at the park.
Now the players willing to count their rebounds … those are the ones everyone wants. And Bob Huggins has a guy like that in Williams.
The 6-foot-9-inch, 255-pound junior forward readily admits he counts his rebounds during games. If you watch him closely, especially in the waning minutes when the outcome is already decided in the Mountaineers’ favor, Williams is often still out there consuming those extra boards the same way your mother vacuums up that invisible dust she believes is still hidden beneath your dresser drawer.
Williams recently scored his 1,000th career point – only the 50th player in 113 years of basketball at West Virginia University to do so – but listening to him talk after Saturday’s game against TCU, a 31-point Mountaineer victory, you get the impression he will be far more satisfied when he pulls down his 1,000th career rebound.
If he plays four full years of college basketball it will happen.
Right now Williams has 738 rebounds following his 13-board performance against TCU, and he’s going to finish this season with more than 800, which makes 1,000 doable sometime in January, 2017 of his senior season.
But naturally, we all like to score, and tag along with scorers, so Williams was required to talk about those 1,002 points he’s scored so far. He admitted he knew about them, too, because just about everyone he knows kept reminding him about it.
“They were telling me all day and for the last week, they were saying ‘nine, nine, nine’ (the points he needed to score against TCU to reach 1,000 points). I’m like, ‘nine?’ Then I woke up (Saturday morning) with some tags on Instagram saying I had a chance to be the 50th player in WVU history to score 1,000, so I knew what the nine meant. But I wasn’t trying to force too much, just let it come to me.”
West Virginia has had better scorers - guys who can soar to the basket and dunk over people, score with both hands, stop on a dime and shoot over defenders or consistently make shots from far away – but there aren’t many here that have earned their points the way Devin Williams has.
Jerry West certainly earned his. He had two broken noses to prove it. Da’Sean Butler also earned his points, the sight of him laying on the floor at Lucas Oil Stadium forever embedded in our minds.
Well, Devin Williams has earned his points, too. Write that down, put it in bold and underline it.
Furthermore, what other Mountaineer players can say they scored 1,000 career points while playing in the best basketball conference in the country with every single scouting report they faced geared toward stopping them?
Not many.
No, this isn’t the Southern Conference we’re talking about, or the Atlantic 10 as the local newspaper suggested West Virginia rejoin after a subpar game against Florida late last month – it’s the Big 12. The big leagues.
Yes, the top teams in the Big East were just as good as the top teams in the Big 12, but the bottom teams weren’t. The bottom of the Big 12 means the NCAA tournament bubble, not another automatic win.
Plus, the game today is far more physical than it was 20, 25, 30, 40 years ago when guys were scoring 1,000 points at a drop of a hat. Do yourself a favor and take a close look at Williams the next time he has his shirt off. The dude is walking scar tissue from all of the cuts and scratches he's received.
Think about it: back in the day, sticking your hand up in the air was considered good defense, and if a defender was within two feet of an offensive player it was considered great defense. Don’t believe me? Just go back and watch the old highlight films.
If guys back in the day got beat on the way Williams gets beat on each time he steps on the floor the games would have been nothing but fistfights. It’s truly amazing how he is able to keep his composure at times, especially when he’s sitting on the bench in foul trouble doing far less than what other players are doing to him.
“I’m just the guy who comes in and tries to clean up,” he shrugged. “That’s what most people think of me as - a hard-nosed, clean-up guy and a hard worker. To score 1,000 points is that extra I’ve put in and I’ve developed as the years went on.”
The guy who can appreciate that statement the most is also the guy who appreciates Devin Williams the most – Bob Huggins.
“He is one of the premier rebounders in the league,” is how Huggins chose to respond to a question about Williams scoring his 1,000th career point on Saturday. “You look around and some of these other guys might have better numbers, but you also have to take into account all the minutes Devin couldn’t play (because of foul trouble). You also have to think that he’s doing all that with (Jonathan) Holton right beside him, who rebounds it pretty well in his own right.
“I think if you’re premier in our league, you’re premier in the country.”
There you have it, from no better authority than the 10th-winningest basketball coach in NCAA history. Ask Huggins to talk about all those points his power forward has scored and the first thing he mentions is his rebounding.
One can only imagine what he will have to say if and when Williams grabs his 1,000th rebound.
It will be a mouthful, for sure. And well-deserved too.
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