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BIG 12 CONFERENCE MEN'S BASKETBALL MEDIA DAYOctober 24, 2018Bob HugginsKansas City, Missouri THE MODERATOR: At this time we would like to introduce Coach Huggins from West Virginia. Your thoughts about the upcoming season? BOB HUGGINS: We gotta get healthy. We're a little beat up right now. When you take Sagaba Konate out of practice and Bolden out of practice it hurts your practice considerably and those two guys haven't gone for quite a while so we just gotta get healthy. Q. Bob, multiple teams in this league have been connected to this FBI investigation and allegations associated with that. What's your reaction to that? What, if any, concerns do you have about a level playing field in this league and in college basketball as a whole? BOB HUGGINS: Well, my first thought is, I keep hearing about the state of our game. The state of our game is really pretty good. If, in fact, which I don't think has been proven yet any of those things happened. They shouldn't have happened, but you're talking about, what, four or five schools at the most? There are 361 Division I schools and I don't know how many Division II and Division III schools. ESPN would take those numbers, if you have three or four guys straight off the reservation you wouldn't say ESPN is falling apart. You would say that people had some problems. With the current state of our game, I don't think it's ever been better than what it is now. If it's not the most watched sport in America, I'm not sure what is. I mean, you guys have six games a night, so I think the state of our game is fine. If things happened, we all know they shouldn't have happened, but that doesn't affect the state of our game and the way people go about doing their business. Q. How impressed have you been with Jamie Dixon and his ability to turn TCU around in two years? BOB HUGGINS: Well, I knew he would because he was 70 miles up the road from us for a long time and we played twice a year. Jamie is a heck of a coach. He's a heck of a coach. His guys play really hard. They play the right way. We have league meetings and you sit there and there are ten of us in there and this league is so hard it's never the same ten guys here the next year, because somebody’s gotta lose. I have no doubt when I'm sitting there looking over at Jamie. You look at the guys in our league and the coaching in this league, is incredible. I think Jamie just moves it up another notch, if that's possible. Q. If your guys get healthy, will your style of play defensively change? Are you going to press a lot? Have you been able to figure out whether you're going to be able to do it? BOB HUGGINS: We're going to try to do it for not more than forty minutes. I think we have to. I think that's kind of what we've recruited to do. We have the best shot blocker in the country, in the back of it, which helps considerably. It's a matter of reputation. Our problem has been, I think yesterday was our 18th practice, I believe, that we haven't had a full complement of guys in any of those 18 practices. That makes it difficult. You're coaching the guys that are there, obviously, but then you've gotta turn around and reteach everything again for those guys that weren't there. It would be like trying to coach you guys. You sit over there and watch, you don't know what the hell is going on. But you sit over there and watch. It's kind of like our guys, they sit over there and watch and they don't know what's going on. Q. When you sat down with Konate in the off-season, when you picked apart guys and want them to get better. When you told him that in order to be great you need to do X or Y, what are the things you told him to really work on and take his game to the next level? BOB HUGGINS: Well, what I'm told by all the NBA guys is they need their four man to be able to switch because they're switching everything now. If you are going to switch they're going to put you in a ball screen with the guard. So you have to be able to get the guard in front of you. Nobody is saying you've got to stop them all the time. Nobody stops anybody all the time in that league, but you've got to be able to keep them in front of you. We talked to Sags about being able to do more defensively on the perimeter on a one-on-one basis. That's the first thing. I think the other thing is you've got to be able to make open shots. He doesn't necessarily have to make threes. He can and he's worked hard at it, but he's got to be a consistent shooter from 17, 18 feet because you've got to be able to drag your guy away from the basket. You don't have to shoot a three to be able to drag 'em away from the basket. If you shoot 17, 18-footers, you're going to drag 'em away from the basket. That's pretty much what I was told, so I just kind of conveyed that to him. Q. I was wondering, you're one of the few guys that have coached in both the Big 12 and the Big East and I wondered about that challenge series coming up next year, what does that bring to both leagues? Do you have any preference or place you want to revisit in the Big East? BOB HUGGINS: Well, the Big East isn't the Big East that we knew. They still have some people, but it's not the Big East that we once knew. It's fun to go to New York. I like going to New York and playing and then leave and go home. I like playing there. Generally speaking, the crowd in the Garden is very knowledgeable. They're great basketball people, so I enjoy that a lot. For us, it's good because that's one less time change, that's one less trip. We can fly to virtually anywhere in the Big East in an hour. So that helps us. Q. You talk about Konate, what's going on with him in terms of injury and will it affect him the start of the season? BOB HUGGINS: I don't think it will affect him at all. We're just being careful. It would be nice to have him out there so the other guys get used to him, but we can sit him for another week and he'll be fine. It's just precautionary. Q. Coach, Esa Ahmad back for his senior year, how much higher is his ceiling than what we have seen from him? BOB HUGGINS: I think a great deal. When you watch, Esa's not a big jumper. He's not exceptionally quick or fast but he really knows how to play. His best games are really when he plays without the ball because he understands how to use screens. He understands how to take advantage of defensive people breaking down. He's got those huge, huge hands. So he doesn't fumble balls. He can rebound the ball out of his area because he's got huge hands. It's amazing. When Billy Hahn was with me, you ever see the big ball that Baylor fits through the rim? He bounced one to Esa and he was standing there holding it with one hand talking to us. That's big hands. His greatest attribute is knowledge. He really does understand how to play. THE MODERATOR: Coach, thanks for your comments. Good luck this season. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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