Hard work the goal for undermanned WVU

Once again it was a case of being undermanned with only eight eligible scholarship players on the roster, which leads to being overplayed, but it is more than that.

It is an unfamiliarity with each other on a roster that was put together not once, but twice.

They are far behind opponents in preparation, off badly in their shooting and, not very good at rebounding and defensively they have very few answers, as Xander Rice showed them on Saturday as he dropped 30 points on them.

“I told the guys I’m just as guilty as anybody else,” Eilert said in his post-game press conference. “I have to figure out what I can do better. We need to all have a heart to heart. I questioned whether they liked each other. Sometimes in transition, we’re not pushing ahead. I think they do [like each other], but on the court sometimes it doesn’t look like they do. We have to figure this thing out and we will.”

It’s less a case of liking each other as it is a case of fitting together as a smooth unit, getting the ball to the right man on offense, setting the proper screens, having the proper spacing.

“I keep telling the guys each and every day we have to figure out how to play off of each other,” Eilert said. “In basketball, nothing is ever perfect the way you draw it. The defense can take you out of something and you can still get the right look or a good look. That cohesive synergy is something we’ve struggled with and we’ll have to figure it out sooner rather than later. I guarantee you we’re going to probably see a lot more 2-3 zone.”

Now, it isn’t very often you use the term cohesive synergy in a sports story, that seemingly far more fitting in a term paper, but you gotta say what you see.

That’s what forward Quinn Slazinski does.

“You miss shots in basketball, but there’s some stuff that’s inexcusable,” Slazinski said. “We have to be the first ones on the court. If we aren’t, the media should kill us for that. A 50/50 ball, in a West Virginia jersey, growing up as a kid, I’m like West Virginia hasn’t lost one 50/50 ball. We have to have some of that emotion and fight and understand this is bigger than one individual.”

They can change a lot of things, but right now as Jacksonville State comes to the Coliseum for a 7 p.m. Tuesday game, there is one thing that isn’t changing.

“We have a short bench and we’re trying to manage that as best we can,” Eilert said. “This team has faced a lot of adversity and challenges before and this is one we’ll try to dissect and learn from this and move on.“

That short bench shows itself in many ways, from offense to defense to strategy, but also in free throw shooting, WVU making 16 of 23 against Monmouth.

“You could tell the legs weren’t there and we weren’t making those free throws,” Eilert said. “When you miss two front ends of a 1- and-1, that’s a dagger in so many ways. You work hard to score and we’re struggling to score, and we miss those front ends. Then you go to the line for two and you miss two. We have to take advantage of every opportunity that we can get. We have a very, very small margin for error, and somehow we have to figure out how we shrink that margin for error.”