Huggins not fretting over loss of 3-point shooters

Seniors graduate, but more and more, transfers transfer and Huggins is left with only the bare bones of what he must go to battle with come winter.

This year was especially trying, for alongside the expected departures came two bolts from the blue as two starting guards and top scorers — Eron Harris and Terry Henderson — packed up their Nikes and headed elsewhere.

Fans acted as if the sky were falling.

“I don’t know we’ve ever gotten hurt by guys who didn’t want to be here. We get hurt by guys who are here that don’t want to be here,” is Huggins reaction to the events.

“You don’t get hurt by guys who leave because they don’t want to be here, or whatever reason … chasing the pot of gold on the other side of the rainbow or something legit. I’ve always felt we were a lot better off when we had guys who wanted to be with us.”

Huggins went to work. He’d done it before and would do it again.

“You try to fill your needs,” Huggins said Tuesday before sending his 2014-15 team out to practice.

He had been aiming his recruiting at this year for a while. Juwan Staten was the linchpin, a point guard who scores and plays defense and was the preseason Big 12 Player of the Year; Devin Williams was a sophomore whom he expected to grow into an inside force.

Huggins had a pair of forwards in Jonathan Holton and Elijah Macon who had been in NCAA purgatory, sitting out a year but armed and ready to change the nature of the team.

But then WVU lost its two outside shooters.

“We needed some guys who could make some perimeter shots,” Huggins said.

And so he went to get them, adding recruits in junior college players Jaysean Paige and BillyDee Williams to a pair of hotshot freshmen already signed, advanced freshmen whom he felt could contribute right away.

“Whether they can (shoot 3s) or not we don’t know yet, but on paper Jaysean Paige shot 44 percent, which is better than either of the guys who left,” Huggins said.

Huggins is aware Paige’s percentage came at Moberly Area Community College, and not in the Big 12, so that’s why he hesitates, just as he can’t be sure that BillyDee Williams will repeat the 40 percent he shot last year or the 43 percent from his freshman season at South Plains Community College.

The shooting, Huggins believes, is taken care of, as was his need for yet another ball-handler with Tarik Phillip, who follows Truck Bryant from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Morgantown, only Phillip comes after a stop at Independence Community College.

Huggins has been criticized over the years for not being a coach who took advantage of the 3-point shot, his reputation having grown on defense and rebounding, but he gets testy when people try to say that.

“The misnomer in Cincinnati was that we didn’t shoot 3s,” he said. “(Broadcaster Jay Jacobs) made a comment one time to me about would you have liked to have had someone like Alex Ruoff at Cincinnati. I said, Jay, I did. I had six guys make more 3s than Alex, and Alex is our all-time shooting leader and that’s all John’s guys did was shoot 3s.”

Huggins maintains he always did have teams that would shoot 3s.

“We just didn’t force them,” he said. “We got easy baskets and the majority of those were offensive rebounds. Defensively we created offense and that led to easy baskets.

“We led the league in scoring for a long time. What happened was we got so good defensively it took people a long time to score, so our possessions per game went down. Our points per possession were better but our points per game were worse.”

That WVU leaned so heavily on 3s with Harris and Henderson last year showed the Mountaineers really didn’t have the game Huggins wanted.

Now, forced into reconstructing his team, Huggins seems to have done so in the style of play that suits him and his coaching philosophies best. These last couple of weeks before the season begins are aimed at shaping them into the unit that he’s looking for.

Follow Bob Hertzel on Twitter @bhertzel