You’d be hard pressed to find a college program that was dealt a more difficult hand this past year than the West Virginia men’s basketball team.
The Mountaineers began the offseason landing a handful of highly regarded players in the transfer portal, including Syracuse big man Jesse Edwards, Arizona point guard Kerr Kriisa, and Montana State’s Raequan Battle.
That trio of newcomers, along with the expected return of Jose Perez after sitting out because of eligibility issues, put Bob Huggins’ team in a good spot to compete in the vaunted Big 12 conference in 2023-24.
However, Huggins was terminated from West Virginia after a pair of incidents, including his second DUI arrest, and the result was a significant chunk of talented players leaving the program and transferring elsewhere.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the team was then dealt a tough hand with Kriisa getting hit with a 10-game suspension for an impermissible benefit from his time at Arizona, while Battle and fellow transfer Noah Farrakhan were deemed ineligible as two-time transfers.
Jose Perez then left the program just before the season began due to a dispute over academics, leaving the Mountaineers with a shell of a roster through the first 11 games of the season – where they went 4-7 including losses to Monmouth, UMass, and Radford.
Interim head coach Josh Eilert and this ragtag group of players looked destined to get crushed on a weekly basis in the Big 12, but the pendulum has finally started to swing back in West Virginia’s direction.
The return of Kriisa from his suspension kicked things off, and the recent ruling allowing all two-time transfers to immediately suit up gives the Mountaineers both Battle and Farrakhan for the rest of the season, and the trio combined to score 53 of WVU’s 91 points in a win over Toledo just before Christmas.
Sure Toledo isn’t a powerhouse opponent, and yes the team is without Edwards for a couple more weeks after he suffered a wrist injury, but it’s hard not to be cautiously optimistic about this team now that they are approaching full health.
Battle in particular is a huge piece to get back into the mix, as the 6’5 senior guard dropped 29 points with six rebounds against Radford on December 20 and then had exactly 29 again three days later in the win over Toledo.
Battle averaged nearly 18 per game last season at Montana State and his scoring ability will be a welcome addition to this team, along with Kriisa’s high-level facilitation skills, which has resulted in 23 assists in just three games – already the third most on the team.
The Mountaineers will play Ohio State on Saturday before getting into conference play the first weekend in January, and while they will certainly have their hands full with the Kansas, Houston, and Baylor’s of the world – they are at least in a better position to compete with a trio of guards back in the fold.