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Men's Basketball Notebook - Iowa State
January 31, 2017 01:18 PM | Men's Basketball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Toughness is a difficult thing to measure. Bob Huggins will be the first to admit that it’s virtually impossible to determine the toughness of the players he recruits.
And it’s probably one of the few things the clairvoyant, 35-year coach will admit he doesn’t really have a full handle on.
“I can lie to you and tell you yeah, but I don’t know how you can tell,” Huggins said the other day. “You go watch AAU and you figure out who’s tough and who’s not. And that’s what it comes down to. How we recruit these guys is by watching them play AAU.”
But just because he can’t tell which players are tough or not doesn’t mean his basketball teams aren’t tough. Some of that is taken care of simply through the recruiting process - oftentimes by the other programs who recruit against him.
“They’re continually telling kids they can’t play for us because it’s too hard,” Huggins said. “Our response is if that’s the case then you probably ought to go there if you’re afraid of hard work. If you’re afraid of getting better go somewhere else.
“But I don’t want them to know that, though, because then they’ll come up with something else,” he joked.
The subject of toughness came about during Huggins’ teleconference with local media. The Dominion Post’s Justin Jackson pointed out that Nathan Adrian is now tied with Dale Blaney for 15th in school history with 124 career games played.
By the end of the season, Adrian could approach Da’Sean Butler (146), Joe Mazzulla (145), John Flowers (142), Darris Nichols (141) and Wellington Smith (140) for the most games ever played in a Mountaineer uniform.
Counting the number of games played is perhaps one way of determining players’ toughness, especially considering the physical nature of college basketball these days.
Adrian is 124 for 124 during his career, making him Mr. Dependable. That’s no small feat considering what he had to deal with his sophomore season.
“Nate played his whole sophomore year with a big cyst in his wrist and played hurt,” Huggins noted. “Consequently he didn’t shoot the ball that well, but who would with a cyst the size of a small marble in your wrist?”
If you poll the guys at the top of the games played list, you will likely learn that they dealt with injuries during their careers as well - and most likely kept it to themselves.
“Wellington Smith played a good portion of his senior year with a stress fracture,” Huggins said. “Neither one told anybody (Adrian didn't tell the team's medical staff his wrist was bothering him until after the season). Neither one said, ‘I’m hurt.’ They just played on. When you look at Da’Sean, when he got 43 against Villanova we were 100 percent sure he wasn’t going to be able to play and he comes out and gets 43.
“I think it’s their will to play and their ability to play through injuries,” Huggins said.
By and large that’s been the case with Huggins’ players throughout his career, going all the way back to his days at Walsh.
“Nobody is going to feel good every day, some of us don’t feel good any day,” Huggins joked. “It’s kind of like that old Jim Brown thing. Jim Brown always said you get up and you go back to the huddle. You can hurt all you want in the huddle but don’t ever let them know they hurt you.”
You can count Nate Adrian in that group.
Briefly:
* It will be interesting tonight to see how Huggins chooses to use the press against Iowa State’s fantastic senior guard Monte Morris, who is averaging a team-best 16.4 points and 5.8 assists per game.
Will Huggins put a defender on the player inbounding the basketball or will he sag off as he did against Kansas when the Mountaineers faced Jayhawk guard Frank Mason III?
West Virginia was unsuccessful containing Oklahoma’s Jordan Woodard in a recent loss, thus necessitating the adjustment.
“His ball security is terrific,” Huggins said of Morris. “I don’t know if we can get him to turn it over much either. Hopefully, we can continue to put new people on him and try and wear him down a little bit.”
Morris is averaging 34.3 minutes per game, the most for the Cyclones.
If you look across his stat line, you will notice he is shooting much better from 3 this season.
“He’s making shots off the bounce. He’s become so much more of a scoring entity for them,” Huggins pointed out.
* Of course, we know about West Virginia’s foul shooting woes and also its turnover issues that have crept up in some games, but Huggins is dealing with another conundrum with this year’s basketball team - defensive rebounding.
The Mountaineers are first in the Big 12 in offensive rebounding and last in the league in defensive rebounding, which has the coach scratching his head.
Some of it can probably be attributed to the number of extra possessions West Virginia is generating through the turnovers it is creating, but that doesn’t fully account for the lack of defensive rebounds the Mountaineers are failing to grab on a nightly basis.
“We don’t get hard rebounds,” Huggins explained. “We don’t rebound the ball out of our area. When Devin (Williams) decided to leave we sat down as a staff and what I said to our guys was what we were going to miss the most was his ability to get hard rebounds. And secondly, rebound out of his area.”
Huggins believes grabbing a few more defensive rebounds could have made the difference in some of the close losses West Virginia has had this year.
“You go back to the Oklahoma game, we could have put the game away had we rebounded the ball at the defensive end. We didn’t and they made us pay,” he said.
* It is a late tip for tonight’s game in Ames, Iowa, at 9 p.m., meaning the Mountaineers will once again arrive back at the practice facility in the wee hours of the morning as they did following the Texas Tech game.
That means the staff will have to maximize their time getting ready for Saturday’s game against drastically improved Oklahoma State, which won its fourth straight game on Monday night at Oklahoma.
The Cowboys are now 14-8, 3-6, after starting league play 0-6.
College Basketball Crown Recap
Thursday, April 16
Ross Hodge, Honor Huff & Brenen Lorient | Oklahoma Postgame
Sunday, April 05
Ross Hodge, Treysen Eaglestaff & Brenen Lorient | Creighton Postgame
Saturday, April 04
Ross Hodge & Honor Huff | Stanford Postgame
Thursday, April 02
