West Virginia didn’t play well on the road in an 86-62 loss to Pittsburgh. That’s clear.
The Mountaineers shot just 39-percent from the field and 20-percent from three, while were at 48-percent and 37-percent in a game that they controlled from start to finish. The Panthers got on an early run and didn’t look back leading the entire game.
“I think there was a lot that we could correct. I think there were a lot of things that played out in that game that, obviously, we weren't anticipating. We thought we had a great week of practice, and then the game didn't play out the way any of us wanted it to,” head coach Darian DeVries said.
Overall, the first-year head coach felt that his team didn’t run very good offense or get quality shot selection up and down the roster. Some of that can be attributed to a lack of movement and activity on the offensive end, while defensively they did some good things early but weren’t consistent enough.
The Mountaineers want to use their defense to generate offense by getting into transition and creating easy baskets and the program simply didn’t get enough stops on that end of the floor.
“We're a good team when we're really hooked up and we're connected and playing together on both ends of the floor. But our margin for error is pretty thin, like a lot of teams. So when a team comes out and we're not scoring it well, we got to be able to stay in that game. And then vice versa,” DeVries said.
Pittsburgh made it a key to try to make things difficult for both Tucker DeVries and Javon Small which isn’t necessarily unexpected because that is likely to be a common theme. But that’s where good ball movement and getting guys in the right spots to make shots will become critical.
“We still have to be able to get them good opportunities and create good quality shots for them. And that's as an offense where we've got to continue to evolve and find ways to get them open, but also utilizing other options as well,” DeVries said.
While West Virginia would prefer to learn those lessons while winning, that wasn’t the case here and sometimes you have to simply move forward because there are more battles ahead.
“But the important part now is after it's over, make sure we learn from it to avoid that again,” he said.
Another is simply avoiding players trying to get back in the game by themselves and working together as a team in order to get more quality shots across the board because that’s when the Mountaineers become much tougher to guard.
The key now is to simply move forward from the defeat and that first opportunity comes against Iona. Sometimes teams have games like what unfolded last week, but the key is to make sure it is an outlier and not define what type of team that the Mountaineers are this season.
“It's not what I thought that game was going to play out, but it did. And we have to understand why and make the corrections. It's a young season right now. There's a lot of season to play out,” he said.
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