What WVU needs to do when Jesse Edwards can't score the ball
This season, center Jesse Edwards has been everything West Virginia men's basketball could have hoped for but it's crucial to adapt when the Syracuse transfer is swarmed by defenders and can't touch the ball or when he must find other teammates.
Since committing to West Virginia at the end of last season, sticking through a coaching change, a mass exodus and a less than ideal situation, Edwards has answered the bell as the best player for the Mountaineers' hoops squad.
This season, he holds team highs in multiple categories including most rebounds and blocks per game with 10.7 boards and two swats per game respectively, but he also leads the team in minutes per game and field goal percentage while coming up second in per-game scoring, at 15.8 points per contest.
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Leading the way on both sides of the floor coming into the Bellarmine matchup on Sunday, the Knights game planned well against Edwards' interior attack by sending two defenders his way to stifle WVU's favorite option. This made the Mountaineers depend on other scoring options and scrape by with a 62-58 victory over the Knights.
This has not been a consistent avenue for success for interim head coach Josh Eilert's squad, as the Mountaineers have struggled to knock down perimeter shots when the defense collapses on the Netherlands native.
This inconsistency includes 3-for-16 shooting against the Knights on Sunday from beyond the arc and a season-long trend on shots bouncing out, with 126-for-331 (38.1%) field goal percentage on the season and a struggling mark of 37-for-125 (29.6%) shooting from beyond the arc.
Since the primary option for Edwards to look towards in a trapped situation is an open teammate on the perimeter, it's up to his peers to continue to improve at scoring open baskets and keep the defense honest.
If this lack of shooting becomes a trend or an issue, even more defenders could swarm the interior and disrespect shooters, making scoring points a nightmare situation for WVU.
In these double-team and potentially triple-team situations on the interior, the fifth-year center understands the importance of his choices and that he must simply depend on his teammates to make open jump shots.
"At that point, it's part of the game plan so I know that I can try to go through the double-team and that's fine too but if you're going to force too many of them, you're trying to look for the best option every time," Edwards said. "Every time there's a wide-open shot, I'm going to give it to my teammate because I know we work on that, I know you're going to make it eventually. If that's the open shot, that's the right shot for me, whether they fall or not in that moment.
Edwards may have overcome these missed opportunities and the extra defenders thrown his way to finish the game with 17 points, 14 rebounds and three blocks in the four-point win, but other challenges came his way.
Not to discount his dominance this season but on Sunday, seven of those 17 points came from the charity stripe while he also finished 5-for-10 from the field and accumulated a season-high five turnovers on Sunday. These are much worse marks than what West Virginia has come to expect from its star.
He understands that these easy opportunities are hard to come by and they're something he must take advantage of in his role.
"I was mad at myself for sure, still am. It's some stuff I feel like I usually don't do and I definitely know how to take better care of the ball than that," Edwards said. "It happens so, you just got to keep playing and focus on the next play, that's what you learn here. That's what I tried to do and the guys obviously, we support each other."
The experienced big man knows how to get his teammates involved as well when his shots aren't falling and he said this is something he tries to do when things aren't going his way.
"It's always frustrating when they don't fall," Edwards said. "When I couldn't get mine, you kind of try to get the momentum and the team going elsewhere and then you'll get it back at some point."
All season, Eilert has also been preaching to anyone who will listen about the number of touches that Edwards needs to receive in West Virginia's half court offense, but he's also wary of what can happen if his players can't connect on a jump shot and what he hopes the offense can become.
"Teams are going to look at the numbers and start scouting us and might even start sending triple teams down if we can't make a shot," Eilert said. "They're going to throw as many bodies as they can at those guys down low and it can't be Quinn [Slazinski] and Jesse [Edwards] as our only scoring threats, we got to have a balanced attack."
As Eilert said, the two primary scoring options are forward Quinn Slazinski, the team's leading scorer with 16.3 points per game and then Edwards. So for the interim leader, he takes the responsibility that his program must develop scoring threats around these stars to gain the aforementioned balance.
"Those guys around them, we've got to figure out a way to get some more production out of them," Eilert said. "That can be a flip of the switch because they're all capable."
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