WVU must play it smart to save season
Huggins says cutting down on turnovers is key
West Virginia has its work cut out if it wants to save itself.
Despite finishing the regular season on a high note with a win over TCU, the Mountaineers finished last in the Big 12 with a 4-14 record in conference play.
As a result, they will play Kansas State on Wednesday. The rest of the conference — other than Oklahoma State, which is barred from postseason play — will wait until Thursday.
The calculus here is simple: West Virginia likely has to win the Big 12 tournament to get into the NCAA tournament. To do that, the Mountaineers would have to beat the Wildcats, then beat topseeded Kansas, then beat Texas or TCU before finishing the run off in the championship.
That is a daunting task, to be sure, especially for a team that struggled mightily in conference play.
Yet, throughout those struggles, there has been a sense that West Virginia had something better within it. It did start the season 11-1, beating major-conference teams like Pitt, Clemson and even Connecticut, the No. 20 team in the country right now. It also came tantalizingly close to beating Baylor and Texas Tech.
All of those factors have led the Mountaineers and coach Bob Huggins to believe that better results are possible. In Huggins’ mind, though, it isn’t about building momentum off a seasonending win.
“When we were [11-1, momentum] didn’t seem to help us much,” Huggins said. “We’ve just got to play. We’ve just got to make up our minds that we’re going to come in and play, we’re going to come in and compete. We’ve played everybody in the league. We know we can win.”
More importantly to Huggins, his team has to play smarter. There are two ways to think about West Virginia’s struggles down the stretch of the season.
On one hand, if a team shows time and time again that it is turnover-prone and susceptible to stretches of ineptitude, then it would be unwise to believe it can just turn that off and play better at the snap of a finger.
On the other hand, the Mountaineers pretty much did just that against TCU. West Virginia turned the ball over just five times in the first half of Saturday’s game. In the second, it nearly doubled that with nine turnovers, and many of them combined to help the Horned Frogs climb back into things and take a sixpoint lead.
Huggins said, in a timeout huddle, the Mountaineers willed themselves to play smarter down the stretch and finished the game with only one turnover in the final 7:51.
“It’s what we talked about in the huddle: Don’t do this again. Don’t give it to them. If they’re going to beat us, make them beat us,” Huggins said. “If you look at what we’ve done over the course of the year, we haven’t gotten beat that much, as we’ve just given games to them. We’ve thrown the ball to them for lay-ups. We’ve made terrible decisions. Today, we started on that path, and we had a timeout and had a talk about it, like, let’s don’t give another one away.”
If there is another sign of hope, it’s that West Virginia has already beaten Kansas State this season. As you might guess, the Mountaineers kept their giveaways down in that game, with just 11 turnovers.
Of course, that was back at the beginning of January, and it gave West Virginia a 12-2 record at the time. So much changed after that.
Perhaps that is appropriate, though. As the Mountaineers dive into postseason basketball, they will try to rediscover their early season form to save their season.