West Virginia’s defense has struggled this year and with changing lineup combinations, and a lack of true center, those issues were quite evident in their 81-67 loss to Kansas State on Tuesday.
“On some of it with the hard hedges and the traps with the game plan going in we just didn’t have the right rotations and the
right closeouts and the right tags on the back sides,” West Virginia interim head coach Josh Eilert said.
“I thought our traps were good early and I thought it could be effective, but we didn’t have the right rotations on the backside to do that. Sometimes when you put your bigs out there, and I say bigs you know our 4-guy is playing the 5 or playing out of position, it makes it hard for them to shore up the glass.”
West Virginia ranks last in the Big 12 giving up 71.6 points per game this season. In addition, they are 1-6 in games where the opponent shoots at least 45 percent from the field, and they are 2-8 in games where the opponent shoots at least 40 percent from the field.
Against Kansas State, there seemed to be easy drives to the basket, and an emphasis on getting to the rim. Kansas State head coach said their team’s mentality is to get to the rim.
“That’s just an emphasis for us as a team. When the ball gets to the paint, good things happen,” Tang said.
The Wildcats ultimately scored 44 points in the paint, and out-rebounded West Virginia 35-22.
“They’re going to force their will down low. I think if you go back to the first nine games, what did I do — I continued to force the issue down low with Jesse (Edwards) because that was my advantage. We lacked depth, but if you can get an easy bucket, and you can force it down low, then you force it down low,” Eilert said.
Another part of the problem for Eilert is communication. Eilert said a lack of communication led to a level of dysfunction on the defensive end.
“There were a lot of communication errors out there. You know, guys running into handoffs, guys getting back cut, it’s something easy to point at and say we need to correct that, but a lot of that stuff is built in the summer, and you keep on grinding that thing as you go into the practice season. We’re certainly behind on all that and we haven’t been the
same team all year,” Eilert said.
A contributor to this is the lack of consistency around WVU’s roster with guys being on and off the court and the ideal starting five never touching the floor at once this season.
“You know, early in the season, we were doing everything we could to keep Jesse (Edwards) out of foul trouble and we had no bench and playing a different style of defense to make up for those inefficiencies and now we got the new guys in,” Eilert said.
“We’re close to a full roster without a 5-man and now we’re trying to play a little differently. It’s not clicking yet. K-State hadn’t seen a lot of zone, but they do have some good shooters on the floor. The one time I did go zone, out of the timeout, they got that lob, so I didn’t see that as something I wanted to go back to.”
