West Virginia Wins Their 7th Straight

West Virginia had 5 different players score in double figures in the 32-point route of the New Jersey Institute of technology Highlanders in their seventh straight win.  Jevon Carter led all scorers with 25 points, hitting 7-14 from the floor and 5-11 from behind the arc.

The game was tightly contested in the first half.  The highlanders were a bit undersized, but managed to score 34 points in the paint.  Their tenacity on the defensive end and the ability to switch defenses gave the Mountaineers trouble for most of the first half.

NJIT kept the game close for the first 15 minutes of the game with efficient offense and going 4-9 from three-point range, but the Mountaineers started to pull away from the Highlanders late in the first half, ending the half on an 18-8 run in the final 5 minutes, taking a 16-point lead into the locker room, 49-33.

Jevon Carter led all scorers with 16 points and recorded 3 steals to break the school record for career steals set by Greg Jones from 1908-1983 (252).  The all-time steals leader was humble of his accomplishment after the game and is just focused on winning this year, “It don’t mean much now, I’m sure it will mean a lot once I’m done, but right now I’m focused on game by game and moving onto the next”.

West Virginia Head Coach Bob Huggins commented on Jevon Carter breaking the career steals record.  “I just hate to see if that’s the only thing he is remembered for” and had more to say on his Senior guard, “It’s just not steals. He was the national defensive player of the year, he’s been a first team all-Big XII defensive player for 3 consecutive years and this will be four.  He is also going to be top 10 or so in assists and probably top 12 or 10 in scoring”.

West Virginia came out hot in the second half and got the crowd fired up with a 15-2 run in the first three and a half minutes, extending their lead to 29, 64-35, and the Mountaineers would never look back.

The Mountaineers were able to get a lot of minutes down the stretch from some of their bench players, and those are valuable minutes this early in the season.

The Mountaineers had 29 points on 19 turnovers in the game, but Huggins wasn’t too happy with his defense, “We can’t turn people loose the way we turned people loose today and their a good team they are going to win their league, I think.  We can’t turn people loose to the middle that can 1. finish around the rim and 2. Pass to other people that are spotted up outside.  We gotta cut the floor in half and we didn’t do that”.

This young West Virginia team is steadily improving, and they look like a better team than they did in the opening game of the year against a ranked Texas A&M team.

They will have their chance Tuesday to show just how good they are when #18 Virginia comes to Morgantown.