What Darian DeVries Said Following the Loss to No. 10 Houston
The West Virginia Mountaineers (12-4, 3-2) fell to the No. 10 Houston Cougars (13-3, 5-0) Wednesday night 70-54.
West Virginia head coach Darian DeVries sat courtside with WVU play-by-play announcer Tony Caridi for his initial thoughts on the loss in Houston.
Opening Statement
I really thought the way the game played out we did a lot really good things at time and we knew going into it that turnovers were going to be the biggest key and we only had 12 turnovers which were a couple more than maybe you would like but all of them that seemed like resulted in points. I think we had 12 turnovers and they 24 points off of those turnovers. (Houston had 25 points off turnovers). So, they were really efficient in taking advantage of any time we gave them a loose ball and going down and converting when our defense wasn’t allowed to get set.
I thought the second half we came out and were much more aggressive and some better things defensively which led to some better offense as well and then (sophomore forward) Amani (Hansberry) gave us a big spark in the second half. But every time we got back in there it seemed like there was a big turnover from us that didn’t give us a shot – didn’t even get the ball up at the rim and those are the things that are just killers when you’re playing a team like this on their home floor. And you get it down to five, I think, two times we had it down to five with the ball and we turned it over both times and both of them were unforced. And those are the things that we talked about that we couldn’t have those in this game and unfortunately, we just had too many.
Houston senior forward J’Wan Roberts scoring a game-high and Houston career-best 22 points
Our gameplan going into was to play him one on one and he made us pay for it, but we also double him twice in that first half and then one time in the second half and they hit three on both of those. So, he puts you in a really tough spot because he is such a good passer. As the second half went on we went less double again and more kind of crowding him and I thought that was good for us than the other two alternatives.
Halftime defensive adjustments
I was too concerned about some of their getting spread out and I told them from my standpoint that I put us in a bad spot. We’re built to be aggressive and physical and in the second half we got back to that a little bit more and pressured the ball and got into them and were able to disrupt them a lot more.
Houston with 11 threes on the night
We went under on multiple threes tonight and our gameplan was to go over everything and not give them any clean space to operate and we made several mistakes there, and to Houston’s credit they made us pay on every single one of them – in key moments too. We went under two ball screens back-to-back when we had cut it down to five and all of a sudden went back to 11 and they were both on mistakes by us going under ball screens on one of their shooters.
Like a told the guys, ‘You’re not going to play perfect basketball, but tonight, we probably more of those types of mistakes than we’ve made in awhile and those are the things that good teams like this they make you pay for.’ From that standpoint, we just have to be a little better and be a little more disciplined in some of that and not give guys points as we like to tell them.