MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Scan this year’s NBA rosters and you will find Bob Huggins-coached players throughout the league. There is Kenyon Martin and DerMarr Johnson at Denver, Danny Fortson at Seattle, Ruben Patterson at Milwaukee, Jason Maxiell at Detroit and James White at San Antonio. All these guys cut their teeth with college basketball’s sixth winningest coach.
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| Sixteen of Bob Huggins' former players have played in the NBA. AP photo | |
“Over my career I think it is 16 guys that have played in the NBA,” Huggins said. “For that reason guys think that I can help them get to the NBA.”
Six-nine forward Kenyon Martin was the No. 1 overall selection in the 2000 NBA draft. When Huggins recruited Martin to Cincinnati he barely weighed 180 pounds.
“He left at 240 pounds,” Huggins said. “When he came in he could shoot it from about a foot and a half. Then when he left he’s out shooting 3s. I didn’t do that. I kind of helped him straighten out his jump shot. It wasn’t picturesque when he came in but he did all the work.”
Huggins said Martin didn’t take any magic pills: it was just good, old-fashioned hard work.
“The truth of the matter is they do it because they do all the work,” Huggins said. “They say, ‘Look what you did with Kenyon Martin.’ What I did with Kenyon Martin was open the doors to the gym and Kenyon went in there and worked. We opened the doors to the weight room and Kenyon went in there and worked.”
Huggins is known as one of the hardest working recruiters in the business. If there as an AAU tournament in the remotest of places with even the hint of an outstanding prospect, Huggins will find a way to get there.
When former West Virginia coach John Beilein left for the University of Michigan last week, some Michigan sportswriters implied that Morgantown, W.Va., is a black hole for Top 100 basketball recruits, the small-town college environment unappealing to inner city players. The message: the ceiling is much higher in Ann Arbor than it is in Morgantown.
Of course the people who write these things conveniently forget about places like Storrs, Conn., where someone like Jim Calhoun has been able to construct a powerhouse college basketball program. For those of you that haven’t been to Storrs, it’s not exactly urban.
“I don’t think having people come to Morgantown is going to be hard at all,” Huggins said. “Sometimes we have these inferiority complexes that we don’t have any reason to have. This is a wonderful state with wonderful people. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? That’s what we’ll sell.”
Huggins has first-hand experience selling small college towns. Last November, he put together the nation’s No. 1-rated recruiting class at Kansas State. His recruiting pitch has been the same whether he’s been at Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State or now at West Virginia.
“We’re going to win and I think that’s what everybody wants to do,” he said. “We’re going to win and we’re going to win big.”
Having done this for so long, Huggins says he has a specific type of player he looks for.
“You recruit guys that one, fit in,” he said. “I like to recruit guys that we call in the business ‘have motors.’ Guys that don’t have motors are hard to coach – guys you have to fight with all the time to get to play. When you’re fighting with them to get to play it’s hard to coach them.
“I’m 53 ½, I’m not 30 anymore,” he said. “I didn’t mind going out there and fighting with them when I was 30. Now I just want to go out there and coach – have them enjoy it and have me enjoy it.”
Presently, West Virginia has only one scholarship available for the spring signing period which begins on Wednesday, and lasts through May 16.
Huggins has seen most of West Virginia’s players either on television or in the summer playing AAU games and he believes the transition will be a smooth one. All but two of the players that were on this year’s 27-9 team that won the National Invitation Tournament are underclassmen.
In fact, ESPN’s bracketologist Joe Lunardi put out his first field of 65 this week and despite having a new coach, he has West Virginia as a No. 6 seed. That says something for the team Huggins is inheriting and also the respect those in the business have for Bob Huggins.
“I think these guys have been very well coached and they’re good players. Naturally that’s going to make it easier and if I don’t screw it up they should be fine,” Huggins said.
Huggins admits he is a big fan of Beilein’s coaching style.
“He’s a really good coach,” he said. “When you coach guys well and you coach the fundamentals … they understand fundamentals, they can pass, they can shoot, they can dribble and they can stop, pivot and guard -- you can do a lot of things.
“I know these guys have been schooled very well by a great coach and are very fundamentally sound,” Huggins said. “I think we could probably ask them to do pretty much anything and they can go out there and do it. We could take five minutes and say, ‘Let’s put in the flex.’ I think they can probably figure that out.”
The most gratifying part of coaching, according to Huggins, is watching a young player with raw talent grow and improve his game.
“I like going to practice; I like teaching,” he said. “I like doing what we do. I like watching guys grow up and get better. It is fun when you get text messages from Nick Van Exel – from a guy you’ve had years and years ago and he still cares.
“That’s the great thing about being called coach is the interaction you have with young people and getting to watch them grow up and mature and go on and be successful in their lives,” Huggins said. “You can’t imagine what that is like until you actually do that and experience that.”
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