AUG 20’

By Conner Streeter

BOB HUGGINS- WEST VIRGINIA vs. KENTUCKY 2010 ELITE 8

Bob Huggins has literally done everything in college basketball that any one coach can do with the exception of nailing down that final, and most elusive, crown jewel….winning an NCAA Championship. He’s taken 2 different schools to Final 4’s, coached a POY, put multiple guys in the NBA, won conference and league championships, published multiple basketball books on X’s and O’s and philosophies, made tons of NCAA Tournaments, is going to finish 3^rd in All Time Wins and be in the Basketball Hall of Fame by the time he’s done coaching. His credentials are impeccable, and he is included on the very short list when it comes to one of the All-Time great coaches in the college game.

His best coaching performance however, possibly occurred in the 2010 ELITE 8 matchup against Kentucky.  This Kentucky team has gone down in history as arguably the best team to not win a National Championship (ironically along with their undefeated 2015 team that lost to Wisconsin in the Final 4, who both make up that very small list). To expound on its greatness, this was the John Wall/Demarcus Cousins team. They were the #1 seed in the East and 35-2 heading into that game.  I’m not sure if you can quantify just how fast and dominant John Wall was at going to the rim. He was unguardable. And DeMarcus Cousins was a force of nature in the paint. Had they won a title, people would have been talking about them as one of the best teams ever, and rightly so. They played great defense and were phenomenal on the offensive glass. Their numbers as a whole were;

On the defensive end, they were:

-1^st in Block %

-3^rd in eFG%

-6^th in both Adjusted Defensive Efficiency and 2P FG%

On the offensive end, they were:

-5^th in Rebound %

-6^th in 2 Pt FG%

-22^nd in Adjusted Offensive Efficiency

On top of that, the aforementioned Wall went on to be the #1 pick in that year’s draft and later became a SuperMax Player and 5x All Star before being injured. Cousins was the 5^th player taken in that draft and also received a max contract, was a 4x All Star before injuries prevented a 2^nd similar contract and more All Star appearances. Patrick Patterson was a lottery pick who has played 12+ years in the NBA. Eric Bledsoe was drafted 18^th, and just entered into a recent 4 yr $70M contract. Daniel Orton was a 1^st round pick, and both DeAndre Liggins and Darius Miller were 2^nd round picks in later drafts and both played multiple years in the NBA.

West Virginia, while having a great team, had 2 draft picks on their roster, with the best De’Sean Butler, never making it there after suffering a horrific knee injury later that year in the Final 4 vs Duke, so in pedigree and caliber of player, John Calipari far exceeded Huggins in talent, but the game went off as Kentucky only being a 4 point favorite, and that speaks to the reputation that Bob Huggins has with smart bettors.

Heading into the game, Huggins had a 7-1 record vs Calipari H2H, with those games coming while he was at Cincinnati and Calipari at U Mass and Memphis.  John Calipari is a better coach than the “he’s just a great recruiter” moniker he’s given, but he and his Kentucky team got completely blindsided and taken apart by a brilliant Bob Huggins masterpiece that night in the Carrier Dome.

As noted above, Kentucky was dominant all year long and it was because of their ability to get to the rim and their excellent transition game, that was often fueled by their tremendous defense. That is exactly how you want to play when you have those caliber of players on your roster, because their skill level is so high and they aren’t going to be stopped much in 1 on 1 situations. Even if you can run the perfect defense against it, it doesn’t mean it will work. So Bob Huggins had an almost impossible challenge facing him, in trying to stop them.

What he did was craft a masterpiece that was so brilliant because it did  something that took advantage of Kentucky’s lack of prep time, which was a very smart and tactical move.  His game plan centered around forcing Kentucky to take shots from the 3 point line, and he did so by using a 1-3-1 defense that Calipari and his team were completely unprepared for.  Coming in to the game, Kentucky wasn’t a very good 3 point shooting team (one of the few things they weren’t great at). They shot around 33% as a team which for that season was 218th in the Nation, and many of their shots from 3 came uncontested and often not under any duress because of how good they were at getting to the rim and being able to get their shots in rhythm from John Wall controlling the tempo. Even more important, is they only took around 18 of those per game, so if you could get them to exceed that, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that they will make way less away from the rim than right at it.

What Huggins did, and was really the only choice he had which further shows off his brilliance, was base his defensive game plan on choking off passing lanes, collapsing on Cousins when he got the ball inside, and forcing Kentucky to shoot 3’s. By doing that, West Virginia would take their chances hoping they could hit enough shots and score enough points to win.  As good as they were that season, and they were 12^th overall in Offensive Efficiency, that was bolstered by their 2^nd overall rating in Offensive Rebounding %. That was going to be tough to do against Kentucky, and their usual buffet of 2^nd and 3^rd shots which enhances their offense greatly, wasn’t something they would have available. So even if they played great defense, it was still going to come down to a razor thin margin based on their offense vs defense matchup, because Kentucky was that good, and a much more talented team.

As the game started, West Virginia came out in the 1-3-1 and then later switched to a man to man for a few minutes. Kentucky went on an early 11-0 run amidst of those 2 changes, but did so mainly from transition buckets created by their defense. Huggins unwavered, quickly went back into the 1-3-1, which West Virginia would then stay in for the rest of the game. And here is the backstory on how that 1-3-1 came to be and was even in the arsenal….

If you asked Huggins if he would use a defense like that when he was at Cincinnati, he probably would have laughed in your face. His teams year in and year out, have always played some of the gnarliest man to man defense there is. It’s been labeled by many opposing players over the years as trying to walk down the street and being harassed every step of the way. So a gimmicky zone defense isn’t something he really had used, but here is why he is such a great coach. He inherited the WVU job from John Beilein 2 years earlier, who loved to use the 1-3-1, and some of the current WVU players were also on the floor for Beilein, so it wasn’t unfamiliar to them. Since they were comfortable with it and knew it well, Huggins had kept it around and used it for small spurts during the year, usually out of timeouts or at the end of games to throw a different look at the other team and try and confuse them, because that defense is something that confuses people who are unprepared for it, and it was great for small segments. It has holes in it however, the main one being that it gives up a ton of open 3 pointers, and if a team is prepared for it, they can dissect it and get very good looks. But remember, Huggins was 7-1 against Calipari coming into the game, and Calipari had only faced his Cincy teams where he played hard man to man defense. While there was never a Calipari confirmation of it as as he never went on record and said he didn’t prepare for it, there is no doubt that Kentucky didn’t prepare for the 1-3-1 very much, if at all, based on their performance and how shaky they were at moving the ball around the entire game. Throw in the fact that both teams had Sweet 16 games two days earlier so the prep time was going to be very limited regardless, and it was an absolutely perfect time to employ the 1-3-1. Huggins had to do 2 primary things; Contain Cousins and make it hard for Wall and Kentucky to get to the rim so easily. If he played straight man to man, that wouldn’t have happened, so he rolled the dice and choked those 2 avenues off as best as he could, knowing the trade off he was going to have, was Kentucky would get open looks from 3. It was a hill he was willing to die on, and it was absolutely genius as we look further at the mechanics of the game and how it played out. 

West Virginia started to right the ship offensively against a very strong Kentucky team after that 11-0 run by Kentucky, and Huggins quickly jumped back into the 1-3-1 around the 12 minute mark of the 1^st half. Eventually they took the lead and went into the half with a 28-26 edge, but the effect Huggins was having on Kentucky was much more devastating than that. It was similar to a boxer pacing himself for a fight that goes the distance and peppering his opponent with body shot after body shot in the early rounds, knowing that repetitive early pounding would come into play later in the game. Here you see early on, with Kentucky up 13-6, West Virginia has 3 guys collapsed around Cousins, with 6’2 PG Joe Mazzula, who is the last (1) and is at the bottom in the 1-3-1, checking him up here. The 2^nd screencap is the actual video of the play, where Cousins just bowls over Mazzula and gets called for a charge. While Kentucky was up 13-6 here, this would be the start of the early bodyblows being thrown by West Virginia. Cousins would go on to turn the ball over 5 times this game, 3 more than his season average, and more importantly, 3 possessions that Kentucky lost.