It’s been a hot minute since we’ve played some real basketball. It’s nearly been a month since I posted something in this series, and given our flameout in the Big 12 Tournament, the “snub” from March Madness, and all the waiting we had to do during March Madness, it makes sense why we haven’t seen the good guys take the court recently. All of this time off does make me a bit skeptical, though.
This is a decent Stanford team; they weren’t really close to making the March Madness Tournament either, but still good enough to make some noise in this one. After the very up and down year we’ve had I honestly just need a win. I’d love to be able to celebrate something and being the second ever winner of The Crown would do the trick. Do we have the juice? I guess we’ll have to find out.
I watched the College Basketball Crown Championship game last year, so this is my first time watching any of the lead up, but the crowd is pretty… dead. This tournament is held in Las Vegas and Vegas has a big problem with their fans; no one is from Vegas, so there aren’t any real hardcore fans. Everyone is basically a tourist, and with travel to Vegas becoming more and more expensive, it leads to lackluster crowds like this. Hopefully it will pick up for the championship game, but for the prelims it’s basically a half-empty environment. That being said, the Mountaineer fans still travel well and the “Let’s Go… Mountaineers” chant can be heard lout and clear.
Although we jumped out to a 7-2 lead early, the rest of the half was a fairly even battle. Neither team could really gain an advantage on the other; at one point we scored on 9/10 possessions but we allowed Stanford to score at a pretty decent clip in that same time frame if that gives you any idea of what kind of game this has been through 20 minutes.
Our Seniors are coming to play this game; I think that it’s starting to settle in that this will be the last time that they’ll all play together so that may be a driving factor. Treysen Eaglestaff has 6 points, Brenen Lorient has 9, and everyone else has chipped in a couple points too. I know that when we’re in the middle of competing for a Crown, it’s easy to not think about next year but after DJ Thomas put up 6 points in 10 minutes it’s hard for me to not think about how good he’ll be next season. Maybe we can get a breakout game from him in this tournament too?
You know, it’s been so long that I almost forgot what a WVU late game meltdown felt and looked like. Unfortunately for us we couldn’t get anything going in the second half. Fortunately for them, they had a Ebuka Okorie on their side who finished top 10 in the country in scoring and finished regulation with 32 (21 in the second half). Thankfully we had just a little bit more fight in us.
Honor Huff was fouled on a three point shot with 3 seconds left, nailed all three free throws, and sent us into overtime. Then Honor Huff did Honor Huff things. After having a ho-hum (especially for his standards) game he came alive in OT scoring 8 points and willed us to the victory.
There was a lot more defensive effort and intensity in the last 5 minutes as well. If we could ever get that kind of effort for the first 40 minutes (I’ll take just 35 honestly), then we could really compete with anyone.
Two more wins and we get The Crown. Our next game is on Saturday vs. either Creighton or Rutgers, and I like our chances either way. I love you, Dad. I miss you.
Round The Game 
Leave a comment