MORGANTOWN, WVa. — It was a straightforward bucket. Nothing to it, really: Esa Ahmad flashed from the baseline to the free throw stripe. He caught the pass, glanced back over his shoulder, found himself free, and casually turned into a soft, 15-foot jumper. It went in. Simple as that.
Simple, sure, but hugely important — maybe the most crucial bucket any Mountaineer scored all night.
Or maybe that came later in the second half, as West Virginia began to open the slimmest slice of breathing room between itself and No. 2 Kansas, which had — despite the Mountaineers’ brutal defensive pressure and the bumping WVU Coliseum crowd — steadfastly refused to fade. Jevon Carter had missed a good look at a 3, and WVU forward Nathan Adrian had tipped the rebound to himself, and the crowd had gone nuts, but the Jayhawks had resumed their 2-3 defensive shape and held WVU off for most of the ensuing possession. And then Ahmad, again from the baseline, dove to the paint, caught a cross-court feed from Adrian, and finished simply off the glass.
The former put No. 18 West Virginia in the lead, 60-59, after a brief KU run. The latter extended that lead to 70-61 with just under five minutes to play in a game Ahmad and his teammates would finally blow open.
As important as they were, both were unremarkable, rote, their role in WVU’s success easy to overlook. Had they not been part of Ahmad’s 27-point breakout career-high night, en route to an 85-69 win that snapped Kansas’s 18-game winning streak, they might have been ignored entirely — which makes them perfect metaphors for the quietly crucial, recently-slumping player who scored them.
“Um, no,” Kansas forward Landen Lucas said, when asked whether anything in the scouting report had suggested a potential 27-point night from Ahmad was in the offing. Kansas coach Bill Self’s scouting report urged his bigs to prevent Ahmad from getting to his strong right hand, where he uses his body to ward off challenges around the rim, so it’s not like the Jayhawks didn’t do their homework. But it’s safe to say they also didn’t see Tuesday night’s 10-of-17 shooting, plus a 7-of-9 mark from the free throw line, coming.
Why would they? For much of the 2016-17 season, the focus on West Virginia has revolved around its disruptive defensive style. Rightfully so: In recent seasons, no program has more ruthlessly forced opposing offenses to cough the ball up. Along the way, Bob Huggins’ team earned a perfect nickname, “Press Virginia,” which has stuck so thoroughly it now enjoys prominent placement in WVU Coliseum’s pregame Jumbotron hype-reel.
What’s more, the latest Mountaineers are the best version of Press Virginia yet. They force opponents into mistakes on nearly 31 percent of their possessions — a ridiculous pace that, if it holds, will place them among the best, if not the best, in the stat in the past half-decade. If not longer.
For much of the season, while the Mountaineers were setting those face-melting turnover rate stats on a nightly basis, while guards Carter, Daxter Miles , and Tarik Phillip were flying around the floor, Ahmad was quietly fueling a vastly-improved offense. After a promising but unsung debut season a year ago, Ahmad had been called upon to help replace forward Devin Williams , whose surprising departure for the NBA left the Mountaineers without a clear frontcourt option last spring, and it worked: For the first two months of the season, even among a precisely balanced attack, Ahmad was WVU’s most-used offensive player, and its leading scorer.
Then came the slump — another reason Ahmad’s breakout Tuesday night seemed to come from nowhere.
In the four games prior to the matchup with Kansas, Ahmad failed to score in double digits once. His best game, an eight-point outing in a rout of then-No. 1 Baylor on Jan. 10, presaged four points in a two-point win at struggling Texas, six in a home loss to Oklahoma and just three last Saturday, as the Mountaineers fell 79-75 at Kansas State.
Something was off. Ahmad wasn’t as assertive. He didn’t feel at ease. His teammates stayed positive with him, even as one week of discomfort turned into two.
Huggins had a simpler appraisal.
“He wasn’t very good,” Huggins said Tuesday night. “He wasn’t very good in the Kansas State game, he wasn’t very good in the Oklahoma game. ”
And the solution?
“He just told me to get in the gym,” Ahmad said. “Just stay in the gym. So I did. ”
“He got in the gym,” Huggins said. “I know you guys get tired of me saying that, but he got in the gym. He was in the gym last night at 9 o’clock after being in there early before practice and late there after. That’s what it takes.
“It wasn’t the kinder, gentler approach, in case you were wondering,” Huggins added. “It wasn’t the kinder approach. ”
The approach was, if nothing else, simple. But it was also clearly effective. Ahmad’s re-dedication led to a game that hammered home the difference between West Virginia when it is firing on all cylinders — when it is “turned up,” as Self called it — and when particular pieces go missing. Without Ahmad’s steady supply of straightforward buckets, perhaps the Jayhawks’ respectable 13 turnovers in 66 possessions would have been few enough to keep them in the game as the Mountaineers tightened the screws late. Perhaps, instead of falling apart under the weight of a widening deficit, Kansas would have hung around. Taken the crowd out of the game. Who knows?
Long before that outcome became clear, all the way back in the opening moments after tip, Ahmad drove right and finished a perfectly nice — though hardly eye-popping — dunk. Other than two points, the finish had no tangible outsize impact on the flow of the game.
