MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Bob Hertzel, as he's apt to do, got to the heart of the matter during Saturday afternoon's press conference with Bob Huggins following West Virginia's 17-point, comeback victory over Kansas State to boost is record to 12-2.
 
"What in your mind makes a clutch performer?" Hertzel asked the man who has seen more than his fair share of clutch ones during his 912-win college basketball coaching career.
 
"I think the biggest thing is the will to win," Huggins answered. "I think Gabe Osabuohien has the will to win. Now, he's not a very good shooter and so everybody is like 'he can't shoot' and so, okay, he can't shoot, but he makes plays. He makes play after play after play that enable us to win games, and he's really done that since he's been here."
 
Guard Kedrian Johnson isn't necessarily a great shooter, either, although he was a prolific junior college scorer at Temple College in Dallas, Texas. But Huggins says West Virginia doesn't win the UAB game without Johnson on the floor, and the two clutch free throws he made with 15 seconds left Saturday kept the foot on Kansas State's throat as it tried to steal a win at the Coliseum.
 
Like Osabuohien, Johnson is another competitor.
 
"It's not necessarily all about making shots," Huggins explained. "In some cases, it comes down to ball security. Who do you have that's going to give you ball security? Obviously, Kedy is our best guy at ball security.
 
"Go back to the UAB game and the guy who got us back in the game was Kedy, without question, and Kedy very much got us back (in the Kansas State game)," Huggins added.
 
West Virginia's two biggest shot makers, Taz Sherman and Sean McNeil, certainly delivered on Saturday. McNeil's second-half bomb from Fairmont got things going, and an ailing Sherman responded with back-to-back triples to give West Virginia an eight-point lead.
 
Taz was showing the effects of an idle week by gutting out 14 points on 5-of-13 shooting in 31 minutes of action. Meanwhile, McNeil was magnificent, connecting on 9-of-15 of his field goal attempts for a career-high-tying 26 points.
 
Even in a game when McNeil was not on, such as UAB, he still came up with a clutch basket with three minutes to go to keep West Virginia within striking distance.
 
Those two guys are competitors, too.
 
Sherman and McNeil are not yet Da'Sean Butler or Mike Gansey clutch, but their clutch shooting can't be ignored.
 
Kedy Johnson is not quite Tarik Phillip reliable, but he is becoming a reliable player.
 
And, Gabe Osabuohien might not measure up to some of the impressive bigs Huggins has had here in the past such as Devin Williams or Derek Culver, but you can't deny the value Big Gabe brings to the team each time he's on the floor.
 
Take Saturday, for instance. The senior, coming off COVID-19 protocols, grabbed a career-high-tying 12 rebounds in 28 minutes of action, blocked a shot and handed out an assist. 
 
He also took three charges to give him a team-best 13 for the season.
 
So, when you add those three charges to his 12 rebounds, that's really like grabbing 15 boards when you count the possessions West Virginia is getting out of them. Whenever Culver or Williams grabbed 15 rebounds in a game that always got people's attention - much more so than those combined 15 possessions Osabuohien created on Saturday through his savvy and moxie.
 
Johnson is just a 63.6% free throw shooter and based on those numbers, he is a guy teams are going to foul at the end of games. Yet Johnson was four-for-four at the line inside of a minute to play in the UAB win, and he was two-for-two with 15 seconds to go in the Kansas State victory.
 
Speaking of free throws, sophomore forward Jalen Bridges made the two biggest ones of the game against the Wildcats. The first one, with four seconds left, put West Virginia up by two points. Then, he had to wait about five minutes after Kansas State called a timeout to try and ice him and the officials took another couple of minutes trying to get their business straight before handing him the ball again.
 
Jalen wasn't nervous – he was just ticked off that it took so long for him to have to make the second shot, which he did. And Jalen wasn't exactly having one of his better games either, going 0-for-2 from the floor with a turnover in 17 minutes of court time.
 
Yes, Jalen is a competitor as well.
 
Huggins loves to tell and re-tell the story about how he turned over a rock and found all-time great competitor Tarik Phillip at Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas. 
 
He asked Tarik's junior college coach if he could handle the ball. Not very well, his coach said.
 
Huggins asked him if Tarik could pass it. His coach said he wouldn't call him a great passer.
 
Huggins asked him if he could shoot it. Another no.
 
"So, what does he do well," Huggins asked. 
 
"He wins," Phillip's coach answered.
 
This is not to imply that Tarik wasn't talented, because he's still playing professionally overseas, but he's not one of those guys with the flashy YouTube highlight videos that everybody today loves to share on social media.
 
Nate Adrian is still playing professionally and he wasn't like that, either, nor was Cam Thoroughman, another great competitor. Huggins brings up Thoroughman's name whenever he talks to his guys about what it takes to win basketball games. If you lined up dudes on the baseline to pick teams, Cam Thoroughman, without hesitation, would be the last player anyone would ever choose, right after guard Joe Mazzulla.
 
Well, we saw those two guys once beat No. 9 Duke at the Verizon Center in an NCAA Tournament game, and a couple years later, beat a Kentucky team full of No. 1 draft picks to help the Mountaineers to the Final Four in Indianapolis. 
 
"I never thought Cam would play for us because Cam always thought he was a guard," Huggins joked. "But it came down to we needed somebody who could guard (Luke) Harangody in the Notre Dame game, and he went in and did a terrific job and started from there on. We're the only team in America to have a 6-foot-4 white guy playing center, and he did a terrific job.
 
"A lot of it is inside, how much you compete and how hard you compete," Huggins added.
 
When West Virginia coaches go out looking for players, you better believe those characteristics are being evaluated at all times.
 
Does he find ways to come up with the basketball?

Is he willing to defend?
 
Does he pass it to the right players?
 
Does he want the ball at winning time, or does he run away from it?
 
"You look for guys that want to win and guys who want to compete," Huggins explained. "I think competing is what we all look for. Devin Williams was here last weekend and did you ever see anybody who wanted to get a rebound more than Devin Williams? Why wouldn't you recruit that guy?
 
"It's not about how guys look, it's about how they play," Huggins continued. "I think sometimes people get carried away. You go in and watch some guy in the warmup line and he's dunking every which way there is to dunk and you say to yourself, 'God, what a great prospect' and at the end of the day he's really not."
 
This, in a nutshell, basically sums up how this team has won 12 games so far. Four times it has come back from double-digit deficits to win games against Clemson, Eastern Kentucky, UAB and Kansas State, and three times it has won games after trailing at halftime.
 
They are not always pretty, and they sometimes makes things harder than they should, but there's no denying their will to win basketball games. Even during their worst loss of the season at Texas when Sherman, Osabuohien and freshman Kobe Johnson were inactive, the undermanned Mountaineers kept competing until the very end and actually outscored the Longhorns in the second half.
 
It's easy to get behind a team that competes like this and another stiff challenge awaits West Virginia on Tuesday night when the Mountaineers conclude their two-game Big 12 homestand against 8-5 Oklahoma State, which knocked off Texas last Saturday afternoon in Stillwater.
 
The contest will tip off at 9 p.m. and is slated to air on ESPNU (Rich Hollenberg and Chris Spatola). Oklahoma State won last year's matchup in Morgantown and is 6-3 in games played at the WVU Coliseum.