West Virginia lost their fourth game in five tries on Wednesday, as a late bucket from Radford sent WVU to a 66-65 loss, despite 29 points from RaeQuan Battle in his return.
Battle is Back
RaeQuan Battle was back — finally. Battle returned to the court for the first time this season, scoring 29 points on 9 for 22 shooting. Battle would go 10 for 13 from the free throw line, but the biggest miss of the day was with under 10 seconds left, missing the front end of a one-and-one.
That miss allowed Radford to get a possession, only needing a basket of any kind to take the lead. Sure enough, they converted, with DaQuan Smith hitting the game-winner with 1.5 seconds left.
“Unfortunate ending to a heck of a battle,” West Virginia interim head coach Josh Eilert said after the game.
“Tried to get him going early. You know, he struggled to make shots and I worried about that considering he’s still trying to gain his strength and his stamina back. He doesn’t have his game legs under him yet because it was his first game. He was down 13 pounds just a couple of days ago. I saw it in the practice leading up to it. He just wasn’t 100 percent RaeQuan, yet,” Eilert said of Battle.
“He forced a couple, and I think he would admit that. He’s a special, dynamic player, and we’re going to need him. We’ll just need a more balanced attack moving forward, and everybody on the floor has got to share it and get the really good shot and not the forced shot, which we continue to do over and over. We’ve forced a lot of things over the course of 11 games.”
Rebounding Struggles Continue
West Virginia was without Jesse Edwards and they knew they were going to need a group effort to rebound. They didn’t get that, as they were out-rebounded 46-38, and Radford had 11 second chance points.
“I continue to tell these guys, if we don’t rebound we’re not going to win, and we were minus eight in that category and we gave up 12 offensive rebounds, and those are things we can fix. We can fix that with effort, with attitude and a little bit of want to. So, we have to sure that up if we want (to be) a good team,” Eilert said.
“We’ll look back at the film. Everytime we really shared that ball. Got that extra pass and got that thing moving, we got a good look. A more balanced attack and try to figure out how we build the chemistry amongst all the changes. We continue to battle changes each and every night. A lot of the offense went through Jesse Edwards, and we don’t have Jesse in the lineup, so we’re trying to figure out our new identity offensively. It’ll come with sometimes, not that it’s an excuse but that’s where we’re at right now. Figure out that identity and that chemistry that is going to make us good in the end.”
No Kobe Johnson
Kobe Johnson had started all 10 games for West Virginia to start the season, but he was absent on Wednesday night. Eilert kept it short about Johnson, saying it’s between the two.
“That’s between me and Kobe and where we’re at,” Eilert said. “Coach’s decision.”
Monitoring Akok
Akok Akok has been back for officially two weeks to the day as Wednesday hit. He played in 23 minutes and was WVU’s starting center with Edwards out. Eilert said this is about as far as he can be stretched right now.
“Right now it’s about probably max to about what he can do. You can see it in his eyes, you know he gets gassed and guys when they’re that exhausted just make mistakes. They make mental mistakes and we saw that several times. We need to give him probably shorter spurts out there and more rotations between him and Pat (Suemnick) and we’ll look at that as we move forward.”
