Defensive Lapses in 2nd Half Cost WVU Basketball Against BYU

On the list of things a defense cannot do in the final seconds of a game, leaving the paint wide open for a layup is at the very top of the list. Unfortunately for WVU basketball, a defensive lapse on the final possession resulted in just that as BYU was able to take advantage and secure Tuesday’s 73-69 victory.

“We were switching everything and we messed up the switch,” WVU coach Darian DeVries explained. “Two guys went with the ball and he rolled and there was nobody there.”

BYU’s Mihailo Boskovic got a drop pass and drove the open lane for a layup, which turned into an and-one when Sencire Harris’s desperate block attempt was whistled for a foul. Boskovic’s three-point play put the Cougars up four with just nine seconds left on the clock.

That final possession was the end of what had been a second half full of small defensive errors that cost the Mountaineers dearly.

“The biggest thing was we lost a lot of our discipline, not keeping the ball in front of us and they were playing downhill the whole second half,” DeVries said. “Then we were in rotations you cannot get in against that team because now it’s layups and kick-out threes. In the first half, we didn’t do that.”

BYU shot 55.6% in the second half after shooting just 35.7%in the first. The Cougars also went from committing nine first-half turnovers to just three after halftime.

It wasn’t a simple case of BYU suddenly getting hot shooting it either. The Cougars shot the exact same in both halves, 5-14, but improved greatly from inside the arc. BYU was 5-of-14 on two-pointers in the first half and 10-13 in the second.

“I just think we didn’t stay to our principles in the second half,” WVU senior Toby Okani said. “We were playing to our principles in the first half and we lost that in the second half.”

DeVries said WVU’s biggest issue was the inability to keep 6-foot-9 BYU point guard Egor Demin out of the paint.

“I thought we did a good job with him in the first half and in the second half we just got too aggressive and then he was playing downhill a lot,” DeVries said. “We weren’t able to keep him out of the paint and once he gets in the paint, he’s so tall and long he can finish, he can drop it off and he can kick it out for threes. That was the biggest difference in our first-half and second-half defense, he was in the paint a lot more with two guys on the ball.”

Denim scored just two points in the first half on 1-5 shooting but had 14 in the second shooting 5-for-7.

West Virginia didn’t defend any differently Tuesday than it has all season, but the Mountaineers’ aggressive ball pressure reached a tipping point where the risk outweighed the potential reward. Instead of disrupting the other team’s flow, like the Mountaineers have done so well all year and even did in the first half Tuesday, the aggression on the perimeter just opened things up for the Cougars to work their offense inside out.

“We want elite ball pressure, we need to really challenge ball handlers,” DeVries said. “You have to have enough discipline to be able to pressure the ball and not gamble so much that now they’re by you and they’re playing five on four. We want our guys tough, we want them into the ball, we want them physical, but you have to have some discipline with it too.”

Typically, the Mountaineers haven’t gotten burned by their ball pressure thanks, in part, to having an elite shot blocker like Eduardo Andre as the second line of defense in the paint. Andre, who is fifth in the Big 12 with 36 blocks, only played 10 minutes, however, as DeVries opted to go with Amani Hansberry’s offense, he scored eight points with four assists, at center over Andre’s defense. 

The Mountaineers played very well on offense, scoring their second-most points in the last nine games, shooting 46.6% themselves and having 19 assists on 27 baskets.

“The margins are always thin. For us, it’s really thin and that’s why we have to have our defense carry us,” DeVries said. “For a game where our offense was rolling the way it was, that’s a game we should’ve put away. We didn’t do that because our defense wasn’t what it needed to be.”

WVU basketball gets a chance to bounce back when the Mountaineers travel to Baylor this weekend for a 2 p.m. tipoff Saturday afternoon. The game will be broadcast on ESPN2.

For a related story, WVU basketball fans concerned about bubble watch after another tough loss.