West Virginia doesn’t need elite recruits to be among college basketball’s best

It was a familiar feeling when West Virginia walked off the court on Jan. 24 following a dominant 85-69 win over the No. 2 Kansas Jayhawks.

For the second time in two weeks, the Mountaineers had knocked off a top-two team. Earlier in the month, WVU hosted No. 1 Baylor and walked away with a 21-point win.

Add in a victory over then-No. 6 Virginia in December, and West Virginia has has three decisive wins over top-10 teams this season. These results should stop surprising anyone. West Virginia is up to No. 7 in the polls and is putting together one of the best résumés in the country.

To anyone paying attention, it’s no secret that West Virginia is one of the most capable teams in college basketball this year. But how they’ve accomplished this can all be vexing to the naked eye.

West Virginia can’t recruit at an elite level — at least not consistently.

Part of that is due to the lack of in-state talent. Just a handful of top prep prospects (three stars or higher) come out of West Virginia each year, and they rarely stay in state. Of the 15 players currently on the WVU roster, four — Nathan Adrian, Chase Harler, James Long, and Logan Routt — are from the Mountain State. They had six total stars between them as high school prospects.

West Virginia’s had just two top-35 classes since 2013, according to the 247Sports composite rankings. In that time, the Mountaineers have brought in four four-star recruits, three of whom are still on the roster. For comparison, Kansas has a total of five between 2016 and 2017’s respective classes alone.

Sophomore power forward Esa Ahmad is one of the team’s leading scorers, and was the four-star face of the class of 2015. There were times when his arrival may have been in doubt a couple years ago, but the Ohio product got to campus just fine and hasn’t looked back since. He’s the closest thing to an “elite” recruit this team has when you look around the rest of the statistical leaderboard.

Senior Nathan Adrian, a Morgantown, W.V. native, was a three-star forward coming out of high school, and wasn’t even among the top 250 players in the class of 2013. Jevon Carter, the team’s current leading scorer, was another three-star even further down the national rankings. And the same goes for fellow three-star Daxter Miles. Tarik Phillip wasn’t even rated by recruiting sites before arriving at WVU, yet he plays 23 minutes per night now as a junior.

Coach Bob Huggins obviously doesn’t need stars. He just needs players who can be installed right into his system.

Defense first has always been the calling card of a Bob Huggins team, from Cincinnati, to his limited run at Kansas State, to his early days taking over West Virginia. But where his teams once sought to grind you down, these past few Mountaineers squads have been hell-bent on pressing you to death. “Press Virginia” was born in 2014-15.

Since the switch, the Mountaineers have been the best team in the nation in terms of forcing turnovers, on both a per-game and per-possession basis. This season, in particular, they lead by a full steal per game over the next-closest team.

Without the press, West Virginia failed to make the top 50 in either category during the three seasons prior. They failed to accumulate wins at the same rate as well. WVU was 49-49 from 2011-12 through 2013-14, but 68-23 over the last two and a half years.

This year’s defense is also fueled by what may be the country’s most equitable division of labor. No player on the West Virginia roster hits 30 minutes per night (Jevon Carter is closest at 29.6). But 10 players log at least 10 minutes per, and all 15 players on the roster have appeared in a minimum of 10 games.

You can’t run a system like that with a slew of four- and five-star talents looking for big minutes and numbers en route to the NBA. For the Mountaineers, lacking those elite talents has been the fuel that drives a team-first approach. A team-first approach that not only competes with far more talented teams on paper, but beats them.

West Virginia’s 10-man rotation has already taken down three top-10 teams with two more (Kansas and Baylor on the road) to play. If any Big 12 team has had a recent shot to stop Kansas’s reign of terror, this may be the best one yet.