Post by elp525 on Feb 12, 2011 0:04:28 GMT -5
February 11, 2011
By Dave Hickman
The Charleston Gazette
MORGANTOWN - Some of the numbers facing DePaul this afternoon in a game at West Virginia are rather daunting.
The Blue Demons have lost 23 straight Big East games. The number is 24 if one includes the last year's league tournament.
DePaul hasn't beaten a ranked team in its last 26 tries.
Winning on the road? Well, that hasn't happened in the last 28 games.
Here's one, though, that offers the Blue Demons hope while it should make the Mountaineers understandably uncomfortable: three.
With still more than a third of the regular season to play, that's the sparse number of Big East teams that have yet to beat a Top 25 opponent this season. Thirteen have. The exceptions are Cincinnati, South Florida and DePaul.
So in a league where Seton Hall can win by 22 at Syracuse, Rutgers can beat Villanova on a four-point play, Providence can break a 17-game league losing streak by beating Louisville and Villanova back to back, and St. John's can crush Duke and Connecticut by an average of 16 points, how long can streaks like DePaul's last?
Oh, and the Blue Demons nearly beat West Virginia 51/2 weeks ago and have gotten better since then. In the last two games DePaul has lost to Louisville and Cincinnati by a combined seven points.
"They're shooting the ball much better,'' West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said of the Blue Demons, who were outshot 52-40 percent by the Mountaineers on Jan. 4 and still only lost 67-65. "The last two weeks they're shooting it much better from the perimeter.''
All of which should make for an interesting contrast today when No. 25 West Virginia (15-8, 6-5 Big East) plays host to DePaul (6-17, 0-11) in a 4 p.m. game at the Coliseum (televised on WCHS). If the Blue Demons are getting better at shooting the ball, the Mountaineers are getting worse.
That earlier DePaul game in suburban Chicago, in fact, was the last time the Mountaineers made more than half their shots in a game. Only one other time since then - in a 30-point win over Providence, when WVU shot 48.6 percent - has West Virginia even approached 50 percent.
"We can't take the kind of bad shots we did at the end of that first game,'' Huggins said, referring to a night when DePaul erased all of a 14-point second-half deficit, in part because of those poor shots but primarily because of trouble against the Blue Demons' press. "We made some bad shots at the end and we can't throw the ball away.''
If the Mountaineers do that, they should handle DePaul at home. The Blue Demons' get more than half (55 percent) of their scoring from a trio of true freshmen, including 6-foot-8, 210-pound leading scorer Cleveland Melvin (14.1 points per game) and 6-3 guard Brandon Young (12.2). That sort of reliance on youth does not bode well for a road game in a difficult atmosphere.
Still, Huggins said on Friday that he doesn't see this as a trap game - WVU plays five of its next six games against ranked opponents, including a quick turnaround for a Monday game at No. 12 Syracuse - because of exactly the type of upsets listed above. That parity has resulted in a set of Big East standings in which No. 10 and 25 teams in the country (UConn and WVU) are in a four-way tie for seventh place in the league. Still, even the teams that are one loss away from dropping to 11th place are also just one game in the loss column out of third and two out of second.
In other words, every game counts.
"If we don't understand that, we need help,'' Huggins said. "We need to win games. I think they understand that.''
By Dave Hickman
The Charleston Gazette
MORGANTOWN - Some of the numbers facing DePaul this afternoon in a game at West Virginia are rather daunting.
The Blue Demons have lost 23 straight Big East games. The number is 24 if one includes the last year's league tournament.
DePaul hasn't beaten a ranked team in its last 26 tries.
Winning on the road? Well, that hasn't happened in the last 28 games.
Here's one, though, that offers the Blue Demons hope while it should make the Mountaineers understandably uncomfortable: three.
With still more than a third of the regular season to play, that's the sparse number of Big East teams that have yet to beat a Top 25 opponent this season. Thirteen have. The exceptions are Cincinnati, South Florida and DePaul.
So in a league where Seton Hall can win by 22 at Syracuse, Rutgers can beat Villanova on a four-point play, Providence can break a 17-game league losing streak by beating Louisville and Villanova back to back, and St. John's can crush Duke and Connecticut by an average of 16 points, how long can streaks like DePaul's last?
Oh, and the Blue Demons nearly beat West Virginia 51/2 weeks ago and have gotten better since then. In the last two games DePaul has lost to Louisville and Cincinnati by a combined seven points.
"They're shooting the ball much better,'' West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said of the Blue Demons, who were outshot 52-40 percent by the Mountaineers on Jan. 4 and still only lost 67-65. "The last two weeks they're shooting it much better from the perimeter.''
All of which should make for an interesting contrast today when No. 25 West Virginia (15-8, 6-5 Big East) plays host to DePaul (6-17, 0-11) in a 4 p.m. game at the Coliseum (televised on WCHS). If the Blue Demons are getting better at shooting the ball, the Mountaineers are getting worse.
That earlier DePaul game in suburban Chicago, in fact, was the last time the Mountaineers made more than half their shots in a game. Only one other time since then - in a 30-point win over Providence, when WVU shot 48.6 percent - has West Virginia even approached 50 percent.
"We can't take the kind of bad shots we did at the end of that first game,'' Huggins said, referring to a night when DePaul erased all of a 14-point second-half deficit, in part because of those poor shots but primarily because of trouble against the Blue Demons' press. "We made some bad shots at the end and we can't throw the ball away.''
If the Mountaineers do that, they should handle DePaul at home. The Blue Demons' get more than half (55 percent) of their scoring from a trio of true freshmen, including 6-foot-8, 210-pound leading scorer Cleveland Melvin (14.1 points per game) and 6-3 guard Brandon Young (12.2). That sort of reliance on youth does not bode well for a road game in a difficult atmosphere.
Still, Huggins said on Friday that he doesn't see this as a trap game - WVU plays five of its next six games against ranked opponents, including a quick turnaround for a Monday game at No. 12 Syracuse - because of exactly the type of upsets listed above. That parity has resulted in a set of Big East standings in which No. 10 and 25 teams in the country (UConn and WVU) are in a four-way tie for seventh place in the league. Still, even the teams that are one loss away from dropping to 11th place are also just one game in the loss column out of third and two out of second.
In other words, every game counts.
"If we don't understand that, we need help,'' Huggins said. "We need to win games. I think they understand that.''
