WVU Basketball Determined to Learn from Brawl Mistakes

Pretty much everyone was surprised at how the Backyard Brawl played out last Friday, with Pitt dominating WVU basketball and winning by 24 points.

Perhaps no one was more surprised by how poorly the Mountaineers played than their own head coach, Darian DeVries.

“That’s not how I thought that game was going to play out, but it did,” DeVries said Tuesday afternoon. “The important part now is, after it’s over let’s make sure we learn from it to avoid that again.”

The Panthers represented an obvious step up in competition from what West Virginia had previously played this year. Even so, DeVries said he expected his team to fare much better based on how it did in its secret scrimmage, reportedly against Wake Forrest

“We had a secret scrimmage against an ACC team and did just fine,” he said. “Friday night was Friday night and that’s not what we wanted to have happen.”

Just about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong for the Mountaineers in the Brawl. WVU shot just 24-62 from the field and 6-29 from range, Amani Hansberry played just 13 minutes before fouling out and Tucker DeVries scored only six points before fouling out himself.

“You have one or two of those nights a year, you just have to make sure that those are just outliers, that those aren’t who you are,” Coach DeVries said. “I don’t believe that’s who we are and we’ll get better because of it.”

DeVries said the top takeaway from the Brawl has been the importance of West Virginia’s offense and defense to work in tandem. He said WVU’s offense played so poorly, in part, because the defense couldn’t get adequate stops against the Panthers.

“Part of having a good offense is being good on defense,” DeVries said “If we’re good on defense and we’re getting stops, we can get in transition. I think our team’s pretty good when we can get out and we can play with pace. We didn’t get enough stops the other night, so we didn’t get into transition as much as we would like.”

Pitt was on fire compared to WVU, shooting 28-58 from the floor and 10-27 from deep. The Panthers also only turned the ball over 11 times and out-rebounded WVU by 13.

“They’re all connected at the end of the day,” DeVries said. “If your offense is bad, it puts your defense in a bad spot. If your defense is bad, it puts your offense in a bad spot.”

The Mountaineers will put what they’ve learned from the Brawl loss to the test tomorrow night against Iona, who visits the WVU Coliseum for a 7 p.m. tipoff on ESPN+.

For a related story, WVU basketball needs to find its third option on offense.