MORGANTOWN - There are five new additions to West Virginia's basketball program this season and, following Friday night's Midnight Madness debut of the quintet, it was hard to tell which was most impressive.
MORGANTOWN - There are five new additions to West Virginia's basketball program this season and, following Friday night's Midnight Madness debut of the quintet, it was hard to tell which was most impressive.
Personally, my first-impression vote - simply from a shock-and-awe perspective - goes neither to any of the three freshmen (Devin Ebanks, Kevin Jones, Darryl "Truck'' Bryant) nor junior-college transfer Dee Proby.
No, it goes to the gimongous - think cross between gigantic and humongous - new scoreboard/video board/ starship now dominating the center of the Coliseum.
Da'Sean Butler is pretty impressed with the scoreboard, too. "Joe Mazzulla designed it,'' he said jokingly, "so it has to be good.''
But he's even more impressed with those freshmen.
Not from a playing standpoint, although he likes what they can do on the floor.
Not from a maturity standpoint, either, even though he admits that the three are probably going to be ready to play almost right from the get-go.
No, Butler just likes the three because they fit in. They fit in and then some.
"All of them are goofy,'' Butler said. "And I like that because I'm pretty goofy, too.''
Of the three, there's little doubt about which one rates highest on the goofy scale. All three are from New York, but only one is from a place where English seems at times a foreign language.
"I'm from Brooklyn,'' said Bryant. "They all say I have my own language. And I can't disagree. We'll be eating at the training table and I'll say, 'Man, this food is bursty.' They're like, "It's what?' ''
MORGANTOWN - There are five new additions to West Virginia's basketball program this season and, following Friday night's Midnight Madness debut of the quintet, it was hard to tell which was most impressive.
Personally, my first-impression vote - simply from a shock-and-awe perspective - goes neither to any of the three freshmen (Devin Ebanks, Kevin Jones, Darryl "Truck'' Bryant) nor junior-college transfer Dee Proby.
No, it goes to the gimongous - think cross between gigantic and humongous - new scoreboard/video board/ starship now dominating the center of the Coliseum.
Da'Sean Butler is pretty impressed with the scoreboard, too. "Joe Mazzulla designed it,'' he said jokingly, "so it has to be good.''
But he's even more impressed with those freshmen.
Not from a playing standpoint, although he likes what they can do on the floor.
Not from a maturity standpoint, either, even though he admits that the three are probably going to be ready to play almost right from the get-go.
No, Butler just likes the three because they fit in. They fit in and then some.
"All of them are goofy,'' Butler said. "And I like that because I'm pretty goofy, too.''
Of the three, there's little doubt about which one rates highest on the goofy scale. All three are from New York, but only one is from a place where English seems at times a foreign language.
"I'm from Brooklyn,'' said Bryant. "They all say I have my own language. And I can't disagree. We'll be eating at the training table and I'll say, 'Man, this food is bursty.' They're like, "It's what?' ''
For the record, bursty means good, which is what Bryant, Ebanks and Jones all are.
Just how good they are, though, remains to be seen. Or, more to the point, how quickly the three assimilate into the rotation is still up in the air.
Conventional wisdom says that Ebanks, Jones and Bryant will play major roles on this team right from the start. There has been so much hype about the three that it is almost assumed that they will come in ready to play and will take on those major roles.
Wait just a minute, though. Yes, the Mountaineers lost Joe Alexander to the NBA and point guard Darris Nichols to graduation. But there's still a pretty good nucleus here even without any new blood.
In fact, when Bob Huggins talks about who might take over the scoring load from Alexander, he doesn't yet even mention freshmen.
"I don't think we have a guy who can do what Joe did at the end of the year on a consistent basis,'' Huggins said. "But Alex Ruoff is going to be a good scorer for us and Da'Sean is going to be a good scorer for us and I think Mazzulla will end up being a good scorer for us. It's pretty much the same guys.
In a way, that's a perfect situation for the three freshmen to step into. They don't have to be ready to contribute mightily right from the start. And the best part is that coming into the program in Huggins' second year, they also have a lot of guys around them to show them the ropes.
"I think that's the biggest thing that's going to help them. They're freshmen, but everyone on the team isn't a freshman like we were last year,'' said Ruoff, a senior who basically had to start all over again last season when Huggins was hired and introduced dramatically different ways of doing almost everything. "This year the freshmen have people to help them. Last year we were all freshmen and all feeling our way around and trying to figure out what was going on. That's got to make things easier for them.''
Apparently, too, the attitude of those freshmen will help ease the transition. As Butler said, they all seemed to fit in right from the start, even if they were forced into a torturous rendition of the national anthem during Friday night's events.
"They're very good players. They blend in well,'' Butler said. "But what I like more than anything is they fit with us. Truck never stops talking. Never. Devin doesn't talk as much, but he's still a clown. And Kevin's the quietest one of the three, but you never know when he's going to say something goofy.''
Reach Dave Hickman at 348-1734 or dphickm...@aol.com.
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