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Ruoff Still Going Strong In Professional Basketball
June 12, 2020 04:00 PM | Men's Basketball, Blog
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The first professional basketball game since the world shut down because of the coronavirus was played in the Audi Dome in Munich, Germany, last weekend.
It involved German professional clubs Göttingen and Merlins, and one of the players on the floor that day was West Virginia's Alex Ruoff.
Who could forget Alex Ruoff?
He still owns West Virginia's single-game 3-point record, accomplished against Radford on Dec. 23, 2008 when he drained nine 3s on the way to scoring a career-high 38 points.
"(Coach Bob Huggins) likes to tell the end of that story when I missed five in a row," Ruoff said Thursday from his hotel room in Munich. "I think I was nine for 10 and I ended up being like nine for 14 so he took me out and said, 'I've seen enough.'"
Ruoff took off at the tail end of his junior season in 2008 when he scored 21 points in West Virginia's NCAA Tournament first-round victory over Arizona and added 17 in an upset victory over Duke.
He had 14 in the Mountaineers' Sweet 16 game against Xavier they lost 79-75 in overtime in Phoenix.
"We were up six in overtime against Xavier," Ruoff recalled. "Joe Alexander was hot, we had very high-level-IQ players and just some dirty, grind-it-out guys like (Joe) Mazzulla and Cam Thoroughman. We had the perfect recipe that year.
"I really liked the way we were playing, and I thought we could have really made a deep run with that squad, especially the way Joe was playing."
Ruoff finished his junior season averaging 13.8 points with a career-best 128 rebounds.
His senior year in 2009 saw him average 15.7 points per game while connecting on a team-best 88 3-point field goals. However, his WVU career ended abruptly in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Minneapolis when Dayton stunned the Mountaineers 68-60 inside the Metrodome.
The backstory to that defeat was West Virginia not arriving in Minneapolis until the wee hours of the morning the day before the game because the team plane the NCAA assigned the Mountaineers encountered mechanical problems.
"We had three freshmen in our top six, and we are stranded (in Bridgeport) for hours," Ruoff said. "We go bowling and then we go and see a movie. Then we play a smaller school in the first round, and it was a disaster.
"I kind of wished I had done a little more to help us keep our focus, but Dayton had a lot of great players, and they played a helluva game," Ruoff added.
Ruoff's original plan in college was to get his teaching degree and become a teacher and a coach when his eligibility expired. But then his career took off when Huggins arrived and he ended up scoring more than 1,400 points and earning honorable mention All-Big East honors as a senior in 2009. That led to an invitation to play in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament in Portsmouth, Virginia.
A month later, he was invited to play in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas with the Washington Wizards and that eventually led to an offer to play professionally in Belgium.
"I just kind of jumped on a plane, to be honest, not to sound like I didn't have a vision," Ruoff recalled. "My senior year things took off and then that big contract came for my rookie year. Basically, my whole world got flipped upside down."
He played two years in Belgium and spent the 2013 season in the U.S. in the NBA D-League playing for the Canton Charge.
In 2014, Ruoff hooked up with a professional team in Göttingen, Germany, where he had his finest year in pro basketball by averaging 17 points, 4.6 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game.
He has also played in Spain and Finland before returning to Göttingen last December for his 11th professional season.
"I had to re-learn the game when I went overseas," Ruoff admitted. "In my case, coming over strictly as a shooting guard shooting only 3s, there are tons of those guys over here. A lot of the national players do the exact same thing so I really had to go back to the drawing board and learn how to use a ball screen and now I'm more of a point-forward. I can play the one through four and post up if I need to, so I had to kind of reinvent myself a little bit."
The European style of play has found its its way over here as well – about 10 years too late for Ruoff, unfortunately.
"They were still putting people in boxes when I came out. You were either a one, two or a three – you couldn't be all of them," he explained. "I was too small to be a three, and I was too slow to be a two."
But that didn't keep Ruoff from having a fulfilling professional basketball career in Europe. He is one of about a half-dozen to a dozen ex-Mountaineers playing overseas who also make their offseason homes in Morgantown.
Huggins has sort of encouraged those guys to make Morgantown their hub where they can work out and stay in shape during the summertime.
The more basketball junkies in town the better, as far as Bob Huggins is concerned.
"I've had a lot of help," Ruoff noted. "Having Huggins in your corner has benefited me a lot.
"It's a phenomenal support system," Ruoff added. "The term family and brotherhood gets thrown around a lot, but that's the best way to describe it here – just having all of those guys around. We push each other during the summer and root for each other during the season. And we are so connected with the current players. They can lean on us for any type of advice."
One of those ex-Mountaineers happens to be Teyvon Myers, now playing for the Jobstairs Giessen 46ers. Jobstairs is one of 10 teams in this year's tournament in Munich to conclude the German professional season that was interrupted in February.
Ruoff said it's a FIFA-style tournament with pool play concluding this weekend to determine an eight-team field to crown a champion next weekend.
Ruoff contributed 12 points in Göttingen's opening-game victory over Merlins, but back spasms kept him out of Wednesday's 18-point loss to EWE Baskets.
"This is to kind of finalize the season," Ruoff said. "It's just four quick games of group play and then the top eight teams go into the playoffs. It's ghost games. No one is allowed in the arena so it's kind of got a preseason feel to it, but all of the other teams are being quarantined in the same hotel so everybody watches the games from the hotel lobby when they aren't playing."
According to Ruoff, there are some U.S. players familiar to college basketball fans in the tournament this year such as Louisville's Peyton Siva and Xavier's Jordan Crawford.
When the season is complete, Ruoff said he will likely remain in Germany until July 1 before returning to Morgantown for the rest of the summer.
He said he also hopes to get down to Spring Hill, Florida, to see his family if the virus situation down there stabilizes.
"I've got a great situation here," he said. "The team I'm with and the coach I'm playing for it's ideal. We have terrific fans. It's a small city and kind of a low-budget team so it's an underdog mentality; it's a lot of fun."
Ruoff, now 33, said he is looking forward to a 12th professional season in 2021 and perhaps one more after that. When his career is finished, he would like to remain in basketball in some capacity.
"My dream has always been to be a college coach, but I'm not sure what that looks like getting into my mid-30s," he said. "We'll just see what doors open when I'm finished playing, but I'm really looking forward to that next career when my basketball career is over."
It involved German professional clubs Göttingen and Merlins, and one of the players on the floor that day was West Virginia's Alex Ruoff.
Who could forget Alex Ruoff?
He still owns West Virginia's single-game 3-point record, accomplished against Radford on Dec. 23, 2008 when he drained nine 3s on the way to scoring a career-high 38 points.
"(Coach Bob Huggins) likes to tell the end of that story when I missed five in a row," Ruoff said Thursday from his hotel room in Munich. "I think I was nine for 10 and I ended up being like nine for 14 so he took me out and said, 'I've seen enough.'"
Ruoff took off at the tail end of his junior season in 2008 when he scored 21 points in West Virginia's NCAA Tournament first-round victory over Arizona and added 17 in an upset victory over Duke.
He had 14 in the Mountaineers' Sweet 16 game against Xavier they lost 79-75 in overtime in Phoenix.
"We were up six in overtime against Xavier," Ruoff recalled. "Joe Alexander was hot, we had very high-level-IQ players and just some dirty, grind-it-out guys like (Joe) Mazzulla and Cam Thoroughman. We had the perfect recipe that year.
"I really liked the way we were playing, and I thought we could have really made a deep run with that squad, especially the way Joe was playing."
Ruoff finished his junior season averaging 13.8 points with a career-best 128 rebounds.
His senior year in 2009 saw him average 15.7 points per game while connecting on a team-best 88 3-point field goals. However, his WVU career ended abruptly in the first round of the NCAA Tournament in Minneapolis when Dayton stunned the Mountaineers 68-60 inside the Metrodome.
The backstory to that defeat was West Virginia not arriving in Minneapolis until the wee hours of the morning the day before the game because the team plane the NCAA assigned the Mountaineers encountered mechanical problems.
"We had three freshmen in our top six, and we are stranded (in Bridgeport) for hours," Ruoff said. "We go bowling and then we go and see a movie. Then we play a smaller school in the first round, and it was a disaster.
"I kind of wished I had done a little more to help us keep our focus, but Dayton had a lot of great players, and they played a helluva game," Ruoff added.
Ruoff's original plan in college was to get his teaching degree and become a teacher and a coach when his eligibility expired. But then his career took off when Huggins arrived and he ended up scoring more than 1,400 points and earning honorable mention All-Big East honors as a senior in 2009. That led to an invitation to play in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament in Portsmouth, Virginia.A month later, he was invited to play in the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas with the Washington Wizards and that eventually led to an offer to play professionally in Belgium.
"I just kind of jumped on a plane, to be honest, not to sound like I didn't have a vision," Ruoff recalled. "My senior year things took off and then that big contract came for my rookie year. Basically, my whole world got flipped upside down."
He played two years in Belgium and spent the 2013 season in the U.S. in the NBA D-League playing for the Canton Charge.
In 2014, Ruoff hooked up with a professional team in Göttingen, Germany, where he had his finest year in pro basketball by averaging 17 points, 4.6 rebounds and 4.1 assists per game.
He has also played in Spain and Finland before returning to Göttingen last December for his 11th professional season.
"I had to re-learn the game when I went overseas," Ruoff admitted. "In my case, coming over strictly as a shooting guard shooting only 3s, there are tons of those guys over here. A lot of the national players do the exact same thing so I really had to go back to the drawing board and learn how to use a ball screen and now I'm more of a point-forward. I can play the one through four and post up if I need to, so I had to kind of reinvent myself a little bit."
The European style of play has found its its way over here as well – about 10 years too late for Ruoff, unfortunately.
"They were still putting people in boxes when I came out. You were either a one, two or a three – you couldn't be all of them," he explained. "I was too small to be a three, and I was too slow to be a two."
But that didn't keep Ruoff from having a fulfilling professional basketball career in Europe. He is one of about a half-dozen to a dozen ex-Mountaineers playing overseas who also make their offseason homes in Morgantown.
Huggins has sort of encouraged those guys to make Morgantown their hub where they can work out and stay in shape during the summertime.
The more basketball junkies in town the better, as far as Bob Huggins is concerned.
"I've had a lot of help," Ruoff noted. "Having Huggins in your corner has benefited me a lot.
"It's a phenomenal support system," Ruoff added. "The term family and brotherhood gets thrown around a lot, but that's the best way to describe it here – just having all of those guys around. We push each other during the summer and root for each other during the season. And we are so connected with the current players. They can lean on us for any type of advice."
One of those ex-Mountaineers happens to be Teyvon Myers, now playing for the Jobstairs Giessen 46ers. Jobstairs is one of 10 teams in this year's tournament in Munich to conclude the German professional season that was interrupted in February.
Ruoff said it's a FIFA-style tournament with pool play concluding this weekend to determine an eight-team field to crown a champion next weekend.
Ruoff contributed 12 points in Göttingen's opening-game victory over Merlins, but back spasms kept him out of Wednesday's 18-point loss to EWE Baskets.
"This is to kind of finalize the season," Ruoff said. "It's just four quick games of group play and then the top eight teams go into the playoffs. It's ghost games. No one is allowed in the arena so it's kind of got a preseason feel to it, but all of the other teams are being quarantined in the same hotel so everybody watches the games from the hotel lobby when they aren't playing."
According to Ruoff, there are some U.S. players familiar to college basketball fans in the tournament this year such as Louisville's Peyton Siva and Xavier's Jordan Crawford.
When the season is complete, Ruoff said he will likely remain in Germany until July 1 before returning to Morgantown for the rest of the summer.
He said he also hopes to get down to Spring Hill, Florida, to see his family if the virus situation down there stabilizes.
"I've got a great situation here," he said. "The team I'm with and the coach I'm playing for it's ideal. We have terrific fans. It's a small city and kind of a low-budget team so it's an underdog mentality; it's a lot of fun."
Ruoff, now 33, said he is looking forward to a 12th professional season in 2021 and perhaps one more after that. When his career is finished, he would like to remain in basketball in some capacity.
"My dream has always been to be a college coach, but I'm not sure what that looks like getting into my mid-30s," he said. "We'll just see what doors open when I'm finished playing, but I'm really looking forward to that next career when my basketball career is over."
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