Unselfish Basketball is WVU's MO in 2022

In the transfer portal era, student-athletes act as individual commodities. If greener pastures prevail, team allegiance falls to the wayside. These college athletes move about like ships in the night, seeking opportunity, but 42 percent of the time, they get lost in the shuffle.

Now imagine there's a program that embraces the exact thought process that suggested those athletes leave in the first place... A place where scrappy technique is rewarded. The roster is full of athletes with something to prove. A school where having been on two prior programs is the norm. Search the country, and one program welcomes those willing to embrace it.

The Appalachian Mountains and one of the nation's most passionate fan bases help set the scene. Add a Hall of Fame coach and Men's College Basketball's most dominant conference, and West Virginia University rises from the ashes.

Head coach Bob Huggins built this season's team like a patchwork quilt. His roster has worn 16 different sets of school colors before donning the gold and blue, but Huggins doesn't care. He's willing to inherit any player whose gritty demeanor matches his game plan.

Team culture is set by coaches, but reinforced by players. 2022's motley crew of Mountain State transplants might just pan out to be exactly what Huggins needs to shake the rust off last season's 16-17 finish.

"If you look back at it and you look at what happened, we were in a position to win a whole lot of big games, and we didn't," Huggins said of 2021's results. "I don't think that will happen with this group. I don't see Joe [Toussaint] backing down. I don't see Keddy [Johnson] backing down. I don't see Erik [Stevenson] backing down. Different people. Totally different attitudes."

Huggins has compiled a group of transfers intent on playing their hearts out for him. Whether it's community college guys like F Jimmy Bell (Moberly Area Community College), G Kedrian Johnson (Temple College), F Pat Suemnick (Triton College), and F Mo Wague (Harcum College) or Division I stand-outs like G Erik Stevenson (South Carolina), F Tre Mitchell (Texas), and G Joe Toussaint (Iowa), Huggins only judges them on the now. Would they be willing to leave their hearts on the court for this program?

For players like Toussaint and Stevenson, that answer was simple. They needed to look no further than West Virginia to find where they belonged.

"We've got a bunch of guys who want to be here," Stevenson said. "You've got guys who want to be in this program. We've got guys who want to win for this program, for this state, for this fanbase. I think the main thing is that we want to win for Huggs."

When Stevenson and longtime teammate/friend Emmitt Matthews Jr. both entered the transfer portal during the offseason, West Virginia was selected as the duo's final destination. Matthews Jr. already had a trio of seasons with Huggins, and wanted to conclude his college career where it started.

"They were easy," Matthews Jr. said of he and Stevenson's conversations while in the portal. "'Where do you want to go?' 'How are we going to go about this?' There was a possibility that we could play together. That's just how it went."

"It was last April, May-ish we started talking about it," Stevenson said. "We only talked three or four times. We're old, so we don't need a recruiting pitch to go back to where we came from, and he doesn't need to give me a recruiting pitch. Just give me the basics. I was going to come [to WVU] regardless. That's just how much I liked it."

The allure of a college program balances on a handful of intangibles. Playing time. NIL promises. Proximity to home and comfort. The players on Huggins' 2022 team all share a very simple response.

"I think this group really wants to win,' Huggins said. "I think they've got something to prove. I think putting on the uniform means a hell of a lot to them... These guys came here, and it's a different deal. Erik could have went wherever Erik wanted to go. Tre could have went wherever Tre wanted to go. I could write down a list. Joe could have gone wherever Joe wanted to go. They chose to come here... Emmitt wanted to come back."

The Big 12 giveth and the Big 12 taketh. When Fairmont, W.Va. native Jalen Bridges departed the Mountaineers with Baylor on his mind, Texas Longhorns transfer, and Pittsburgh, Pa. native, Mitchell moved closer to home. Something about the 2022 roster's potential narrowed his options right down to one.

"I saw the guys that were coming in," Mitchell said. "That was part of the influence for sure. I knew them, knew about their careers before. For me, it was that I knew, after competing in the Big 12, that I was capable of doing some good things in the Big 12. I just needed the opportunity. When Huggs reached out, it was a blessing. It really was."

Mitchell knew the way that Huggins conducted his program. He wanted to play for a gritty team and have his family come watch. Instead of living 1,417 miles from his family, Mitchell now lived an hour and a half down the interstate.

"This close to home is almost like God dropped it in my lap," Mitchell said. "Since being here, I don't want to leave. I love it here. I love everything about it.

"Being here is nothing like I've ever imagined," he said. "I've told people a million times, 'I can't believe that this culture and this brand of people and basketball was an hour away from my home and I knew nothing about it.'"

The culture is one unlike the identity of West Virginia Men's Basketball last season. Huggins alluded to a group that tended to keep the ball in their own hands instead of sharing the wealth.

Stevenson gave a nod to the culture change, saying that, "We've got a bunch of seniors and some fifth year guys that have got one more crack at it. We're trying to play as hard as we can for as long as we can, and we all do want to be here and we want to be successful as a team. When the team is successful, individuals are successful."

Focus on the betterment of the team is, seemingly, a noticeable shift from the locker room of yore. The camaraderie that this team works from is tangible, and the box scores of a 9-2 record seem to reflect.

"A lot of places, dudes walk into the gym going, 'Oh. I'm going to be the guy. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that.'" Mitchell said. "Our guys take the approach that like, 'What do we have to do to win?' You've seen the stats. You've seen multiple people on our team scoring in double digits because that's the kind of firepower we have. I think there's a maturity that comes with this group. They're hungry and they want to win and they'll do whatever it takes to get there. That's another blessing: to be on a team like that. There's absolutely no egos. Dudes want to actually come out here and get better every single day."

The culture that Huggins has created at West Virginia, and within the walls of the WVU Coliseum, is on the radar coast to coast; players have flocked to it... and found room for themselves within the Hall of Fame coach's game plan.

"There's no selfishness out there at all, man," Stevenson said. "We saw flashes of what we could be in the summer... I'm playing for a guy who just instills confidence. It's kind of like a hand-in-glove fit for me, man."

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