West Virginia men’s basketball team suffered a critical home loss last night to opponent BYU with the final score of 73-69. This puts the Mountaineers at 15-9 overall and 6-7 for conference play while still seeking an appearance in the NCAA tournament.
After a strong first half, West Virginia’s defense seemed to struggle keeping up with BYU’s pick-and-pop styled offense.
“The biggest thing was we just lost a lot of our discipline keeping the ball in front of us, and they were playing downhill the whole second half,” Devries said after the game.
BYU was able to keep the pressure up on Javon Small limiting him to only 9 points and shooting 2-4 from the field. Toby Okani was the Mountaineers leading scorer with 16 points in last night’s performance.
“We’d love to get Javon more shots. We tried a lot of different stuff to free him up,” Devries said. “If he’s able to get nine assists, that says he’s doing a good job of making the plays that are available because of how they’re guarding him. That’s just part of it,” he went on to say.
Despite the defensive struggles, Devries didn’t express much concern about offensive play. “We shot 57% in the second half. I thought, offensively, we made all the right plays from that perspective of taking care of it and stuff,” Devries went on to say, ”Getting that lead up to four and six we just kept exchanging baskets. We weren’t able to get that thing pushed up to double digits.”
Still looking for their spot in the NCAA tournament, the Mountaineers look to move past this loss as they go into the most important stretch of the season. They are set to face Baylor Feb. 15 in Waco.
