I know that I’ve told you this before, but GOD is it fucking annoying to be a sports fan these days. You have to have 4 apps to watch your favorite team, 2 screens, and an extra $500 a year just to watch a game. Even then, sometimes THAT doesn’t work. I’m not ashamed to say it, I sail the 7 seas when I’m trying to watch games because I don’t have an extra $500 or more, but the website I’ve been using didn’t have this game on the marquee, so I had to rely on the radio call. Like I’m 80 years old.
Credit to them, they did well to keep me up on the action, but it’s harder for me to get a real feel of this game without the visual aid. That being said, it seemed like this game was our best showing so far in this very young season. WVU jumped out in front and never really looked back, going up 18 after 10 minutes of play. In that 10 minute stretch we really saw the strengths of this team: playing through Brenen Lorient and our defensive intensity. Brenen had already scored 10 and our defense stole the ball 5 times and got 12 points off the turnovers. I told you that Coach Hodge was going to run a system that you’d like.
I think that will have to be our calling card if we want to do well in the Big 12, and it does seem like we have the guys to do it. Just defensively, Honor Huff ended the night with 3 steals, Jasper Floyd had 1, and the entire team seemed locked in. You could hear the team through the radio call out defensive coverages and screens. All things you love to see (or hear in my case.)
I will say that the staggering of our two Freshman Amir Jenkins and DJ Thomas is a little confusing. Especially in games like this where everything is going our way, I would have thrown the guys out there to see what they could do. I’m sure he’s trying to ease them into it, but I think that if they’d get reps this early on that they could give us some real impact minutes later in the year.
Lehigh finally hit double digits with 5 minutes left in the 1st half, and let me tell you Coach Hodge was HOT when we gave up a wide open layup. I had my doubts that he could be as intense as Huggins was about missing defensive assignments but these first 3 games have been really promising. His North Texas teams were really good on defense as well so hopefully we can continue this success.
WVU ends the 1st half up 22 and they did everything that you’d want to in a dominant fashion. We forced 11 turnovers and scored 14 points off of them, we only fouled TWICE (!!) which has to be some sort of Mountaineer record, and we’re actually winning the rebounding battle for once, 18–10. I should add the caveat that Lehigh has 3 guys who are 6’10” or taller but they played very little minutes. A win is a win though. Harlan Obioha, after I called him out last game, finished the half with 8 points and 5 rebounds. Do you think he read what I wrote?
The second half started with a little bit of a hiccup. This same Lehigh team played Houston earlier this week and outscored them in the second half. Houston won that game pretty easily but at halftime Coach Hodge spent the entire speech really making sure that our guys knew to finish the job. When we came out flat and gave up a dunk in a half court setting, Coach Hodge called a quick timeout. Just another reason why you would have really liked him being our Coach.
Lehigh didn’t outscore us in the second half, but we also couldn’t keep up the pace from our first half. I was scared for a little bit because Andrew Urosevic, who I don’t even remember scoring in the first half, ended the game with 18 points and was really the only bright spot for Lehigh. For the good guys? One undeniable bright spot and a couple of questions.
The story of the game was clearly Brenen Lorient who ended the night with 26/7/3 steals while going 11/15 from the field and hitting 3 3’s. I don’t want to pretend like there weren’t other things to be excited about: Amir Jenkins played well with 6/3/2 and 2 steals, Jasper Floyd, although he didn’t shoot much, seemed in control with 7/5/4, and Obioha finished with 12/8/3. I am concerned, however, because all we did was feed B’Lo and hope that he delivered. Thankfully, he did, but that’s just not sustainable. I love his playstyle but he is not the kind of guy who you can play through every night. He isn’t a playmaker, he’s a play finisher.
I don’t want to get too thick in the weeds about the game; we 69–47 after all. I just hope that we can get more people involved as the season goes on. The team stats looked great: we won the rebounding battle 38–25, we forced 16 turnovers (although we gave up 13), we had 28 points in the paint, and shot 37% from 3. There is a lot to like from the game but I’m never satisfied.
Overall, I think it was a pretty solid effort from our boys. Now I’m going to make dinner and try to wind down before the work week. I love ya, Pops. I’ll see you Thursday for The Backyard Brawl. East Shit Pitt.
Round The Game 
Leave a comment