Mountaineers move to 9-2, Kansas up next
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MORGANTOWN -- You can't understand quite how difficult an afternoon West Virginia's basketball team had on Sunday just by looking at the final score of the game they played against Mercyhurst.
Glancing at that final score, which was West Virginia 67, Mercyhurst 46, you would tend to just ho hum it away before you "ho, ho, hoed" it into Christmas break at 9-2.
With their next game not until New Year's Eve when the Big 12 welcomes new coach Darian DeVries into its fraternity with a friendly game of hoops against conference giant Kansas at their home facility named Phog Allen Fieldhouse that serves as Mecca for all of Big 12 basketball, all would appear right with the West Virginia basketball world.
But there was nothing easy about this one.
Fact is they limped into the game with one of their leaders Tucker DeVries out indefinitely with a shoulder problem and Australian import Jayden Stone has been out with a head injury.
Then 52 seconds into this one another key member of the team, Amani Hansberry, their key big man and not only an inside threat as a key rebounder and a man capable of taking opponent big players out to defend his ability to make 3s, went down with an ankle injury that was bad enough that he didn't return, needed assistance to the locker room at halftime and came out with a boot on the leg.
All of a sudden DeVries was running offense from about half of his available play sheets.
"We're running out of ideas. It's getting harder," DeVries admitted. "We talk to guys all the time. It's next man up. Have yourself ready. You never know when that next opportunity is going to present itself."
Seems like it's only a matter of waiting because something is going to happen.
"Hopefully, Amani is not out a long time. You feel like we have guys, like [walk-on] Harris [Elezovic] tonight, who can come in and give us some production and good minutes," DeVries said. "It's getting mighty slim."
Elezovic played 15 minutes, scored four points, had five rebounds and two assists.
The result is that you wind up with a game like this one, a game in which you are favored by 32.5 points coming in against a team that has just moved into its first season of Division 1 play, but that was down only eight points with 14:46 to go.
"That probably wasn't our cleanest game by any means but the thing I did like about the way we played tonight was that I thought defensively, especially in the second half when we were struggling to get any type of rhythm offensively, our defense kept us in the game, so that when we finally got a little burst now we're able to take a 10-point lead and stretch it out to 20," DeVries said.
"That's hard to do when you're not scoring and you're not getting anything from a flow standpoint. It's to still stay with that type of energy defensively. Proud of the guys from that standpoint, that we were able to guard for that full 40 minutes, especially that second half."
It started with defense. Six-foot, 11-inch Eduardo Andre, who had himself a whale of a game with 14 points, 6 rebounds, three assists and a pair of blocks in extended play due to Hasberry's injury, started it off with one of his blocks that led a fast-break layup from Javon Small, then Joseph Yesufu inserted himself into the action with a couple of steals that not only led to a layup for himself but then a slam from Toby Okani and then a slam on a fast break from Small.
The lead was stretched to 18 points at 48-30 at that point and was Small's 1,000th career point, most of them at Oklahoma State but nonetheless a milestone.
From there the lead skyrocketed to as high as 28 points before the electricity went off and Mercyhurst, fighting hard though outmanned, scored nine straight points, not enough to get into the game but enough to at least make the bus ride back to Erie, Pa., bearable.
The truth was, Mercyhurst did fine.
"Watching them on film, you look at some of their numbers and on film it didn't look that way," DeVries said. "They run really good stuff, they execute well, and a lot of the games they were getting the shots they wanted to get, they just sometimes weren't always making them (shots) at as high a rate as they would like.
"They did a nice job, they came in and competed hard, played hard, and played together. As a tough opponent, to pull away from because on offense they are very deliberate. They're going to run side to side, run one action and reset then run a second action. The flow of the game gets really choppy, especially when you're not scoring."