The West Virginia basketball team needed a bounce back performance after their first loss of the season and they delivered just that in a dominating 86-43 win over Iona.
On the offensive end, the Mountaineers were more connected which led to shooting 52-percent from the floor and 48-percent from three with 15 made attempts.
“You hit 15 threes, that's usually a pretty good night for you, so we’ll certainly take that. Overall I was pretty happy with our ball movement against a team that typically extends their pressure to some degree on and off throughout the game,” head coach Darian DeVries said.
The Mountaineers were able to break the Iona pressure without little resistance and while they did have a total of 16 turnovers they weren’t the pesky live ball types that kept the Gaels to just 5 fast break points. It was a much better effort than what they had even shown in practice leading up to the game.
West Virginia enters every game without any sort of set number of assists that need to occur, but the Mountaineers shared the ball well with 15 assists on 29 made baskets. Still, the total number of turnovers compared to assists is what irked DeVries more than anything.
“That’s not going to work on most nights,” he said.
The focus on the offensive end is to simply take the opportunities that are there which is exactly what they were able to do for most of the game against Iona. That wasn’t the case in Pittsburgh.
That means that some nights the Mountaineers will rely on three-pointers while other times it’s simply using a ball screen to get downhill and finish at the rim.
“I think it's a mixture. We would love to have good balance, being able to get paint touches, being able to finish at the rim, being able to get to the free throw line and being able to make a good percentage of threes,” DeVries said.
But the defensive end is where the first-year West Virginia coach was most pleased. The Mountaineers held Iona to just 24-percent from the field and 26-percent from three, while forcing 21 turnovers.
“I thought our guys did a great job of trying to take away their paint touches, not letting them get downhill, and they put stress on every single bounce to try to get into the paint,” DeVries said. “So guys did a nice job there, and it takes a lot of communication too because they do a lot of little brush screens and things like that.”
The Mountaineers displayed the versatility of being able to switch one through five and were able to create double teams off mismatches and make the correct rotations on the backside.
The only downside was on the offensive glass, where the Mountaineers allowed 18 extra opportunities, which resulted in 12 second chance points. That continues to be a focus for this team to meet its potential on that end of the floor.
“We were in the gaps like we usually are. We talked on defense. One thing we just still need to get better at, which is rebounding, but we take away their second chance points, then we hold them to even a lower percentage,” guard Javon Small said.
----------
• Talk about it with West Virginia fans on The Blue Lot.
• SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest on Mountaineer sports and recruiting.
• Get all of our WVU videos on YouTube by subscribing to the WVSports.com Channel
• Follow us on Twitter: @WVSportsDotCom, @rivalskeenan, @wesleyshoe
