Post by elp525 on Nov 4, 2011 4:50:22 GMT -5
11/04/2011
Chip Fontanazza
Morgantown
There has been a lot hype and excitement surrounding all of the young Mountaineer basketball players this off-season and tonight will be the first chance fans can see them play.
WVU will play in its first and only exhibition game of the season against Northern Kentucky in the Coliseum. WVU head coach Bob Huggins has gotten a good idea of what his young players are capable of, but he says the next step is to see how they do against someone who doesn’t wear the same uniform.
“Everybody knows what everybody else is going to do, at least most of them know,” explained Huggins. “So it’s good to play somebody else. You just get tired of playing against the same people all of the time, but we really need to practice. What this affords us the luxury of doing is going into the film room with them and saying this is what I’ve been telling you.”
Northern Kentucky is coming off a hard-fought 65-55 exhibition loss to Marshall. The Mountaineers had a scrimmage against Xavier last Saturday and due to NCAA rules Huggins wasn’t able to talk about it.
As the week of practice progressed, Huggins was still trying to figure out which players to use.
“I honestly don’t know who we’ll put out there,” said Huggins during Wednesday’s interviews. “I know we are going to put KJ [Kevin Jones] and Truck [Bryant] out there and Deniz [Kilicli], but other than that its kind of depends on who plays better in the next couple days.”
One position Huggins hopes to have a better idea about after the game is point guard. With Bryant moving to the shooting guard position, Huggins has to fill the point. Neither freshmen Gary Browne nor Jabarie Hinds was on the Italy trip, so Huggins has not seen either in a game setting.
“Offensively everything starts with your point guard and we didn’t have Gary and we didn’t have Jabarie in Italy so I didn’t really get to see them there,” said Huggins. “Really the only time we got to see them was against Xavier and Xavier is pretty good.”
Huggins’ teams have a reputation of being very good defensively and he is trying to instill that mentality into his freshmen. He’s seen some progress since they started practicing together over the summer, but they still have a long way to go. One area he is hoping to see more improvement in tonight is their half court defense.
“I think we’ve made a lot of strides in what we do half court defensively, but the best transition someone can get is off a turnover,” said Huggins. “We just throw it away too much.”
“I think the hardest thing is convincing them to throw it to the guys that have the same color shirt that they have on,” joked Huggins. “Its been very repetitive that we’ve been throwing the ball to the wrong team and it really hurts your defense. There is no defense for that.”
Chip Fontanazza
Morgantown
There has been a lot hype and excitement surrounding all of the young Mountaineer basketball players this off-season and tonight will be the first chance fans can see them play.
WVU will play in its first and only exhibition game of the season against Northern Kentucky in the Coliseum. WVU head coach Bob Huggins has gotten a good idea of what his young players are capable of, but he says the next step is to see how they do against someone who doesn’t wear the same uniform.
“Everybody knows what everybody else is going to do, at least most of them know,” explained Huggins. “So it’s good to play somebody else. You just get tired of playing against the same people all of the time, but we really need to practice. What this affords us the luxury of doing is going into the film room with them and saying this is what I’ve been telling you.”
Northern Kentucky is coming off a hard-fought 65-55 exhibition loss to Marshall. The Mountaineers had a scrimmage against Xavier last Saturday and due to NCAA rules Huggins wasn’t able to talk about it.
As the week of practice progressed, Huggins was still trying to figure out which players to use.
“I honestly don’t know who we’ll put out there,” said Huggins during Wednesday’s interviews. “I know we are going to put KJ [Kevin Jones] and Truck [Bryant] out there and Deniz [Kilicli], but other than that its kind of depends on who plays better in the next couple days.”
One position Huggins hopes to have a better idea about after the game is point guard. With Bryant moving to the shooting guard position, Huggins has to fill the point. Neither freshmen Gary Browne nor Jabarie Hinds was on the Italy trip, so Huggins has not seen either in a game setting.
“Offensively everything starts with your point guard and we didn’t have Gary and we didn’t have Jabarie in Italy so I didn’t really get to see them there,” said Huggins. “Really the only time we got to see them was against Xavier and Xavier is pretty good.”
Huggins’ teams have a reputation of being very good defensively and he is trying to instill that mentality into his freshmen. He’s seen some progress since they started practicing together over the summer, but they still have a long way to go. One area he is hoping to see more improvement in tonight is their half court defense.
“I think we’ve made a lot of strides in what we do half court defensively, but the best transition someone can get is off a turnover,” said Huggins. “We just throw it away too much.”
“I think the hardest thing is convincing them to throw it to the guys that have the same color shirt that they have on,” joked Huggins. “Its been very repetitive that we’ve been throwing the ball to the wrong team and it really hurts your defense. There is no defense for that.”
