West Virginia let another opportunity at a big-time win slip away on Saturday against No. 7 Texas.
The Mountaineers dropped to 1-6 in Big 12 play, as they turned the ball over 20 times, and let Texas score 32 points in the paint, and score 14 points at the free throw line.
Toussaint Playing Time
Joe Toussaint has been a spark for West Virginia all throughout this season. The Iowa transfer played just 10:56 on Saturday, including just 3:49 in the second half. Starting point guard Kedrian Johnson played 32:53 on Saturday, as he finished with a career-high 22 points.
“My fault. It’s my fault,” Huggins said. “I was kind of caught up in, ‘Did we play Keddy too much? Should I have got him a little bit more?’ and which one of our guys, Erik (Stevenson) or Seth (Wilson), was going to make a shot because neither one of them were making shots. That’s kind of what happened, and that’s my fault.”
Toussaint finished the game with three points, on 1 for 3 shooting, with his lone make coming on a deep three-pointer in the first half.
“100 percent my fault, and Joe deserves to play,” Huggins said. “Joe deserves to play a lot of minutes. We have guys that played that don’t deserve minutes. They haven’t earned minutes.”
Turnovers
The turnover issue that had plagued West Virginia early in conference play seemed to have become not as much of an issue as of late. The Mountaineers turned the ball over 35 times in their first two Big 12 games, but turned it over 23 times in the next three games. Against TCU on Wednesday, West Virginia turned the ball over 15 times, before turning it over 20 times tonight.
“You can’t turn the ball over 20 times,” Huggins said. “We talked about that earlier in the year and said we were going to fix it. We had it down to where we were turning it over maybe six times a game which wasn’t good, but it’s way better than 20. Now we’re back to 20 and not even playing against pressure. We just throw the ball to the wrong team.”
The main culprits tonight were Johnson and Tre Mitchell, as Johnson had six turnovers and Mitchell had five.
Defensive Execution
West Virginia struggled to guard without fouling late and really struggled guarding Texas guard Marcus Carr. Carr scored 23 points, with 19 coming in the second half. Carr had five points come at the free throw line and made two of Texas’ three three-pointers.
“We just did a bad job,” Huggins said of guarding Carr. “He’s a right-handed guy who loves to go right. We let him go right. He’s a guy who you want to force to the baseline so that you can try to swallow him up with size. We let him go where he wanted. We did everything pretty much opposite of what we planned to do, what we drilled to do as much as you can drill on.”
