Bob Huggins recognizes last year was a failure, but what he is also recognizing is this year will be different for West Virginia.
The Mountaineers this season were picked to finish ninth in the conference — exactly where they finished a season ago. West Virginia returns just five players from last year’s roster which finished with just 16 wins — the second lowest total from the past nine years.
West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins who was recently inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame said at Big 12 Media Days this year will be different. The biggest difference for Huggins he says, the players wanting to be at West Virginia.
“Obviously we’re going to be a lot better,” Huggins said.
Huggins admitted last year’s team made a lot of mistakes despite being on the cusp of making the NCAA Tournament.
“We had a bad year,” Huggins said. “We made some mistakes that were hard to image that we could’ve made those kind of mistakes. We wet two wins away from playing in the NCAA Tournament and when you throw it to the other team as many times as we threw it to the other team; it’s hard to make it up.”
This year’s roster features multiple players which Huggins acquired in the transfer portal. Those include former Mountaineer Emmitt Matthews who returned to West Virginia after spending a year at Washington. Erik Stevenson is West Virginia’s third school, transferring from Wichita State to South Carolina and then to the Mountaineers. Joe Toussaint comes to West Virginia from Iowa. Tre Mitchell comes from Big 12 foe Texas.
The talent is there for the Mountaineers, but according to Huggins so is the buy in with his players.
“I like our team,” Huggins said. “I like what’s happened with guys in the portal, I like their attitude. I think our guys have fantastic attitudes, their work ethic has been really good. It wasn’t so much of that a year ago.”
Huggins said the best addition of this offseason is not one singular player, but rather the change of the makeup of the Mountaineers’ roster.
“I think we’ve gained by subtraction in some regards,” Huggins said.
