West Virginia is the team no one wants to meet in March

With an in-your-face style of suffocating defense, West Virginia basketball is a team no one wants to meet in March Madness.

West Virginia basketball team is always one that gets the most out of their talent but always seems to fall short when it matters. They made the Sweet 16 in three of the past five years but couldn’t get beyond that point. They can have an upset that will put them on the map (more often than not, it’s against Kansas at home), but when it really matters, they falter.

The same thing happens seemingly every year in the Big 12 Championship Tournament. In three of the last four seasons, they went to the Finals. In three of the last four seasons, they lost to Kansas when it mattered. Even last year, with a terrible team, they beat eventual national runners-up Texas Tech, then lost to Kansas in the semi-finals.

This year doesn’t feel like those years.

For one, they got rid of a lot of the players that didn’t seem to work and were partly responsible for the struggles of last season’s team. Esa Ahmad is playing overseas now. Sagaba Konate is playing in the NBA’s G League. The Mountaineers look completely different this year and that’s a good thing.

What’s different this year is the Mountaineers, a team notorious for blowing big leads, is actually growing leads. They have a 13.2 point differential, good for 15th in the country. If you ignore a weird Kansas State loss on the road, they’d be in the top 10.

Besides the loss to the Wildcats, the Mountaineers only other Big 12 loss came in a very defensive matchup with Kansas on the road. They proved they belong in these games, and we will learn even more when they take on Baylor and Kansas in a series of back-to-backs in mid-February.

That’s when we’ll know if West Virginia basketball is poised for a deep run in March.

What gives Mountaineers fans hope they can, is they have a more sustainable system in place. In year’s past, Huggins’ squad would win with the press defense. It caught teams by surprise and gassed them, especially in the first meeting. The issue is the press can be beaten with enough film, so once WVU got to the end of the season, there was so much film on them that the more talented teams were able to find ways to win.

This season, they are winning with players and system. They have a more fluid offense that’s running based on efficiency, and it starts at the top. Oscar Tshiebwe leads the team with just below 12 points per game on 60 percent shooting from the field. He’s also stepped up in big games. Against Kansas, Tshiebwe put up 17 points and 17 rebounds as he put the team on his back.

The Mountaineers go 12 deep. Logan Route is at the back of the bench, and he’s a 6-foot-11 center who returned on scholarship from last season. He’s a senior who brings a lot off the bench when they need it, and he’s already played 125 minutes this season.

Seven Mountaineers are shooting over 40 percent from the floor. That’s the same amount of players No. 1 Baylor has. Over the past five games, they’ve had a different leading scorer in each one. No matter how much tape you get on a team, if they have a different star player every game, it will be very hard to stop.

If this hasn’t convinced you, let’s go to the numbers. Guess how many teams have a better average NET wins rating in the entire nation. One. The average ranking for teams the Mountaineers beat is 92, the only team besides Kansas that breaks 100.

They have stacked the non-conference schedule to get them ready when they play the harder teams later in the season. They also have the second-best strength of schedule and fourth-best nonconference slate.

The Mountaineers will be a Cinderella Story until they prove this is a legitimate contender. They have to avoid the upsets (Kansas State, St. Johns), but that seems to be an issue for everyone across the nation this year.

If they can beat Baylor and Kansas at home, they’ll find themselves in another stratosphere. The Big 12 is already worried about West Virginia, and come March, their opponents will be too.

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