Quick Hits: Team Response After Arizona Loss, Dealing with Multiple Injures, and Managing Pace of Play

The West Virginia Mountaineers (11-3, 2-1) are on the road to take on the Colorado Buffaloes (9-5, 0-3) Sunday afternoon for the first ever meeting between the two programs. Tip-off is set for 3:00 p.m. EST and the action will stream on ESPN+.

Managing the roster while dealing with multiple injuries

That’s something that we’ve been doing. It takes some of the reps away when you’re trying to get multiple guys involved within the gameplan and not sure who’s available or who’s not, but you also have to get everybody ready. So, that’s something we’ve been doing and will continue to do and then adjust it with the lineups we have available on game day.

Responding after the home loss to Arizona

The guys have been great - they’ve responded well. The couple losses we’ve had this year, they responded well after those as well. They are a pretty focused group. They understand we didn’t necessarily have our ‘A’ game the other night and they focused hard on what went wrong. We did plenty of things right in that game too but there’s also some things in areas that we need to be better at and we all know that. Even as a coaching staff, there’s some things we felt we needed to do better as well.

Point guard Javon Small’s 5.4 rebounds ranking second on the team

I think it’s a little bit of just want to, but he’s got good size, he’s good athleticism, he can go in there and compete – he doesn’t get bumped around, he can go challenge balls up in the air, and he’s done a really good job of going and pursuing balls – he’s got the speed to go and track balls down.

Managing pace of play with the lack of depth due to injuries

The tricky part of all that is we’re also very good in transition and that’s where we score the best. So, trying to find a balance of staying fresh throughout the course of the game but also staying aggressive of trying to get out in the open floor and doing the things we think we’re most successful at as an offense. And we’ve done that these last few games. We’ve just chosen our spots of when we want to be more aggressive and run or when we want to slow it down and play more of a halfcourt game.