Huggins Plans to Look Deeper in Transfer Portal
Bob Huggins didn't win 900 plus games the easy way. He isn't like the other coaches at the top of the all-time wins list who has had the ability to essentially handpick their rosters. What I mean by that is four and five-star recruits aren't lining up to come to West Virginia, nor were they during his time at Cincinnati.
Many of his players are often overlooked and under-recruited. Jevon Carter is a perfect example of that. Coming out of high school, West Virginia was Carter's only major offer. His other offers consisted of Akron, Dartmouth, Illinois State, Kent State, Lehigh, Toledo, Valparaiso, and Wisconsin-Green Bay. Carter worked his tail off during his time at WVU and turned himself into a solid NBA role player.
Huggins joked with the media last year about his inability to land some of the nation's best talent. "I told Shane [Lyons] he ought to fire me because I don't recruit good enough or he should give me a raise for winning with the guys that we win with."
Huggins' approach to recruiting will have to change moving forward due to the transfer portal taking over the game. Players are going to leave the program but more importantly, WVU has to do a better job of finding talent in the portal so that they can remain competitive on a year in, year out basis.
"We didn't do very well in the portal," Huggins said Tuesday afternoon. "We've got people watching it every day. I kind of favor the idea of having guys here. I don't really want to have one year guys or certainly not very many one year guys. But you're not going to win with 13 freshmen."
This year's roster additions from the portal G Malik Curry (Old Dominion), F Dimon Carrigan (Florida International), and F Pauly Paulicap (DePaul) have all factored into the rotation but only Curry is truly impacting the team. Carrigan (1.0 bpg) and Paulicap (0.8 bpg) were well known shot-blockers prior to coming to WVU and that's pretty much what they've contributed to the team thus far. The two haven't really helped the Mountaineers on the glass or score in the paint as much they would like for them to. The two combined are averaging 5.1 points and 6.3 rebounds per game.
To be fair, this level of basketball is something that Carrigan and Paulicap have never seen before and it takes time to get used to. The only problem is they're likely only here for one season, so they won't be able to use this as a learning year to be more of a factor for WVU in the future.
"When you play in a league like this that has really, really good players and terrific coaching and we're kind of playing with a bunch of bigs that really don't know our system. You look at that crew [Baylor] down there, they've been together and it makes a heck of a difference," Huggins said following the loss to Baylor last week. "If you think about the good teams that we've had here and the teams that have been together and know each other. I mean, how do you throw a ball to a guy that has his back turned to you? Those things are hard to understand but again, you're talking about guys who haven't been here."
The transfer portal is still a fairly new tool for college coaches, especially ones like Huggins who have been recruiting a certain way for years. The only transfers you really used to see were grad transfers or those who were making their way up from junior college. Since the NCAA passed the one-time transfer rule where players aren't forced to sit out a season when they transfer, it has opened up the floodgates. The portal really needs to be used for needs only but there are some exceptions, however. For Huggins, his focus moving forward will be bringing in guys who have multiple years of eligibility remaining and considering that older, more experienced teams are more successful come March, it only makes sense that he goes in that direction.
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