Photo by: Katie MacCrory
Huggins: Mountaineers Have Strength In Numbers
September 26, 2018 04:29 PM | Men's Basketball
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Evoking the names Martin, Fortson, Blount and Maxiell around Bob Huggins sometimes comes with its hazards.
Mention them in the wrong context as I did earlier today, and he's apt to come up with something good.
And he did.
First, the preliminaries. On paper, the strength of Huggins' 2018-19 Mountaineer basketball team is clearly its frontcourt.
He's got a couple of guys coming back who sniffed around the NBA a little bit last spring, including, hands-down, college basketball's best rim protector in junior Sagaba Konate.
The other guy who briefly put his name into the draft, Esa Ahmad, looks like a completely different person this year. I happened to catch him down on the Coliseum floor the other day with his shirt off shooting jump shots, and the guy looks like an Adonis.
I had to look twice to make sure that was really Ahmad.
It was.
"Esa's been in the gym more than he's ever been in the gym and consequently, it's showing," Huggins said.
Six-foot-8 wings Wesley Harris and Lamont West are still around, as is 6-foot-11, 260-pounder Logan Routt, now a junior.
That's a pretty formidable frontcourt right there.
Now, throw on top of that a couple of really promising freshmen in 6-foot-10, 260-pound Derek Culver and 6-foot-7, 195-pounder Emmitt Matthews Jr. from faraway Tacoma, Washington.
Plus, there's also 6-foot-9, 255-pound sophomore transfer Andrew Gordon, who boasts impressive size and mobility and might be able to help the team this year if his knees can hold up.
That's eight quality players Huggins has this year 6-feet-7 or taller standing near the basket, so it's only natural to wonder if he's considered running some of the same sets he once ran at Cincinnati when he had Kenyon Martin and Danny Fortson positioned near the basket.
That's what I asked him.
His answer: "I haven't seen Fortson and Kenyon down there yet."
Touché, Coach.
But eventually Huggins did get back around to his bigs a little bit later during his annual, sometimes meandering 40-minute-plus session with the media to tip off preseason practice Wednesday afternoon.
What he said about them was pretty revealing.
"I think our frontcourt can play with anybody," he remarked, "when we get Sags back at 100 percent (Huggins mentioned Konate recently tweaked his knee). Logan gave us really good minutes a year ago, and Derek Culver is 6-10, 260, and might be the fastest guy on the team.
"So, you've got those guys and then Esa, Lamont and Wes with a lot of experience," he continued. "They're not going to get nervous because there's people in the stands, and they've been in some really difficult places to play. You've got the young guys you can try and work in there, too. (The bigs) dominate practice, and they dominate open gym."
Furthermore, all three interior positions are fairly interchangeable because Huggins said he doesn't really play with a true center. Most of those guys should be able to switch everything defensively, which makes his interior lineup pretty versatile.
"Sags, kind of because he blocks shots, and Derek would be in the back of the press, but he's going to catch it out on the perimeter, too," Huggins said of the two guys he's got who most closely resemble centers. Routt, too, is in that category.
Culver is a really intriguing addition from Brewster Academy by way of Youngstown, Ohio. The four-star prospect is one of the more heavily recruited bigs Huggins has landed at West Virginia.
"He's got good feet, he just doesn't know how to use them yet, and he does the same thing (offensively) every time," Huggins pointed out. "We've got to get him to have a little better repertoire than that, but he's a talented guy."
As with all AAU generation bigs, Culver is still a work in progress with his back to the basket.
"He's lost," Huggins said, adding, "of course, he's lost facing it too. He thinks he's a good passer, but I don't know how in the hell you can throw it out of bounds and think that's a good pass."
Huggins said despite the added size and brawn, his team is still going to be predominantly a jump shooting team however.
"I think it's going to be advantageous for Sags to take more jump shots," he said. "Obviously, Lamont and Wes are going to take jump shots. Esa shoots jump shots. Derek Culver is learning, and he did some nice things the other day, but I don't know if you want to throw it to a freshman right now to win games.
"I think we're going to play pretty much the way we've been playing, but our strength this year is our numbers," he added. "We've got 15 guys. Logan gave up his scholarship so we could have more guys and Taevon (Horton) is walking on, and both of those guys are competitive."
Huggins concluded, "We can throw a lot of people at them, we've just got to make sure we throw it to our team."
Briefly:
* The veteran coach said on Wednesday that Randy Meador's athletic training room at the basketball practice facility more closely resembles a MASH unit right now.
It's been full of players.
"I've never, in how many years, had this many guys banged up," he said. "It's good that we have 15 guys."
The list of walking wounded include Konate (knee), Gordon (knee), Beetle Bolden (wrist) and Chase Harler (back).
Two others who had been dealing with health issues, Brandon Knapper and Lamont West, are "fine" according to Huggins.
"Andrew (Gordon), seemingly every five minutes, he has to run over and rub his knee," Huggins said. "Sags tweaked his a little bit and Beetle has had all kind of stuff. The latest is he stretched some ligaments in his hand. It looks like a baseball swelled up."
* The other new faces on the team this year include Wisconsin Mr. Basketball Jordan McCabe, high-flying guard Trey Doomes from Acworth, Georgia, and 6-foot-7, 215-pound point guard Jermaine Haley from Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of Odessa College in Odessa, Texas.
Player No. 15 on the roster this season is the aforementioned Horton from nearby Fairmont Senior High.
* West Virginia has scheduled a charity exhibition game against Penn State at the WVU Coliseum on Saturday, Nov. 3 - the same day the football team is playing at Texas. "Hopefully we can get 10,000 in the Coliseum for that," Huggins said.
The Nittany Lions won the NIT championship last year and used to be a regular hardwood opponent of West Virginia's when the two were members of the Atlantic 10 Conference three decades ago.
* Huggins said he changed things up a little bit during offseason workouts to allow his assistant coaches to do more on-court instruction this fall.
He said he wanted to get a birds-eye view of things sitting up top.
"Before, I would have been down there every second, and I haven't been," he explained. "I've kind of sat up there, taking notes and seeing what the guys were doing well and some things the guys need to work on.
"You can see so much from up there. You can kind of see everything come together better than you can down on floor level," he continued. "I think, too, that sometimes hearing the same voice 12 months out of the year, they kind of tune you out. They trick you and act like they're listening, but they're really not. They've heard Ronnie (assistant coach Ron Everhart), Larry (Harrison) and Erik (Martin). They really haven't heard me yet."
That is until now because official practice is underway and Huggins is back down on the floor standing right next to his favorite motivational device – the treadmill.
As a matter of fact, it's probably being used right now as the guys get used to Huggins' voice again.
Mention them in the wrong context as I did earlier today, and he's apt to come up with something good.
And he did.
First, the preliminaries. On paper, the strength of Huggins' 2018-19 Mountaineer basketball team is clearly its frontcourt.
He's got a couple of guys coming back who sniffed around the NBA a little bit last spring, including, hands-down, college basketball's best rim protector in junior Sagaba Konate.
The other guy who briefly put his name into the draft, Esa Ahmad, looks like a completely different person this year. I happened to catch him down on the Coliseum floor the other day with his shirt off shooting jump shots, and the guy looks like an Adonis.
I had to look twice to make sure that was really Ahmad.
It was.
"Esa's been in the gym more than he's ever been in the gym and consequently, it's showing," Huggins said.
Six-foot-8 wings Wesley Harris and Lamont West are still around, as is 6-foot-11, 260-pounder Logan Routt, now a junior.
That's a pretty formidable frontcourt right there.
Now, throw on top of that a couple of really promising freshmen in 6-foot-10, 260-pound Derek Culver and 6-foot-7, 195-pounder Emmitt Matthews Jr. from faraway Tacoma, Washington.
Plus, there's also 6-foot-9, 255-pound sophomore transfer Andrew Gordon, who boasts impressive size and mobility and might be able to help the team this year if his knees can hold up.
That's eight quality players Huggins has this year 6-feet-7 or taller standing near the basket, so it's only natural to wonder if he's considered running some of the same sets he once ran at Cincinnati when he had Kenyon Martin and Danny Fortson positioned near the basket.
That's what I asked him.
His answer: "I haven't seen Fortson and Kenyon down there yet."
Touché, Coach.
But eventually Huggins did get back around to his bigs a little bit later during his annual, sometimes meandering 40-minute-plus session with the media to tip off preseason practice Wednesday afternoon.
What he said about them was pretty revealing.
"I think our frontcourt can play with anybody," he remarked, "when we get Sags back at 100 percent (Huggins mentioned Konate recently tweaked his knee). Logan gave us really good minutes a year ago, and Derek Culver is 6-10, 260, and might be the fastest guy on the team.
"So, you've got those guys and then Esa, Lamont and Wes with a lot of experience," he continued. "They're not going to get nervous because there's people in the stands, and they've been in some really difficult places to play. You've got the young guys you can try and work in there, too. (The bigs) dominate practice, and they dominate open gym."
Furthermore, all three interior positions are fairly interchangeable because Huggins said he doesn't really play with a true center. Most of those guys should be able to switch everything defensively, which makes his interior lineup pretty versatile.
"Sags, kind of because he blocks shots, and Derek would be in the back of the press, but he's going to catch it out on the perimeter, too," Huggins said of the two guys he's got who most closely resemble centers. Routt, too, is in that category.
Culver is a really intriguing addition from Brewster Academy by way of Youngstown, Ohio. The four-star prospect is one of the more heavily recruited bigs Huggins has landed at West Virginia.
"He's got good feet, he just doesn't know how to use them yet, and he does the same thing (offensively) every time," Huggins pointed out. "We've got to get him to have a little better repertoire than that, but he's a talented guy."
As with all AAU generation bigs, Culver is still a work in progress with his back to the basket.
"He's lost," Huggins said, adding, "of course, he's lost facing it too. He thinks he's a good passer, but I don't know how in the hell you can throw it out of bounds and think that's a good pass."
Huggins said despite the added size and brawn, his team is still going to be predominantly a jump shooting team however.
"I think it's going to be advantageous for Sags to take more jump shots," he said. "Obviously, Lamont and Wes are going to take jump shots. Esa shoots jump shots. Derek Culver is learning, and he did some nice things the other day, but I don't know if you want to throw it to a freshman right now to win games.
"I think we're going to play pretty much the way we've been playing, but our strength this year is our numbers," he added. "We've got 15 guys. Logan gave up his scholarship so we could have more guys and Taevon (Horton) is walking on, and both of those guys are competitive."
Huggins concluded, "We can throw a lot of people at them, we've just got to make sure we throw it to our team."
Briefly:
* The veteran coach said on Wednesday that Randy Meador's athletic training room at the basketball practice facility more closely resembles a MASH unit right now.
It's been full of players.
"I've never, in how many years, had this many guys banged up," he said. "It's good that we have 15 guys."
The list of walking wounded include Konate (knee), Gordon (knee), Beetle Bolden (wrist) and Chase Harler (back).
Two others who had been dealing with health issues, Brandon Knapper and Lamont West, are "fine" according to Huggins.
"Andrew (Gordon), seemingly every five minutes, he has to run over and rub his knee," Huggins said. "Sags tweaked his a little bit and Beetle has had all kind of stuff. The latest is he stretched some ligaments in his hand. It looks like a baseball swelled up."
* The other new faces on the team this year include Wisconsin Mr. Basketball Jordan McCabe, high-flying guard Trey Doomes from Acworth, Georgia, and 6-foot-7, 215-pound point guard Jermaine Haley from Vancouver, British Columbia, by way of Odessa College in Odessa, Texas.
Player No. 15 on the roster this season is the aforementioned Horton from nearby Fairmont Senior High.
* West Virginia has scheduled a charity exhibition game against Penn State at the WVU Coliseum on Saturday, Nov. 3 - the same day the football team is playing at Texas. "Hopefully we can get 10,000 in the Coliseum for that," Huggins said.
The Nittany Lions won the NIT championship last year and used to be a regular hardwood opponent of West Virginia's when the two were members of the Atlantic 10 Conference three decades ago.
* Huggins said he changed things up a little bit during offseason workouts to allow his assistant coaches to do more on-court instruction this fall.
He said he wanted to get a birds-eye view of things sitting up top.
"Before, I would have been down there every second, and I haven't been," he explained. "I've kind of sat up there, taking notes and seeing what the guys were doing well and some things the guys need to work on.
"You can see so much from up there. You can kind of see everything come together better than you can down on floor level," he continued. "I think, too, that sometimes hearing the same voice 12 months out of the year, they kind of tune you out. They trick you and act like they're listening, but they're really not. They've heard Ronnie (assistant coach Ron Everhart), Larry (Harrison) and Erik (Martin). They really haven't heard me yet."
That is until now because official practice is underway and Huggins is back down on the floor standing right next to his favorite motivational device – the treadmill.
As a matter of fact, it's probably being used right now as the guys get used to Huggins' voice again.
Players Mentioned
F
/ Men's Basketball
G
/ Men's Basketball
G
/ Men's Basketball
G
/ Men's Basketball
F
/ Men's Basketball
F
/ Men's Basketball
G
/ Men's Basketball
F
/ Men's BasketballRoss Hodge | Utah Preview
Tuesday, February 17
Honor Huff | Utah Preview
Tuesday, February 17
UCF Game Recap
Tuesday, February 17
TV Highlights: WVU 74, UCF 67
Saturday, February 14
