MORGANTOWN - As far as bonding experiences are concerned, the way Jevon Carter sees it there was at least one stark difference between last summer and this for West Virginia's basketball team.
Last year Bob Huggins took his players to a coal mine. This year it was the Bahamas.
"The sun was out,'' said Carter, the sophomore guard. "We weren't underground all the time.''
Of course, how that relates to the relative success of WVU's basketball team this winter remains to be seen. Bonding is great, but it's also ancillary to the X's and O's and the play on the floor. Carpenters or dancers or even sportswriters can bond, but that doesn't mean they can switch on defense or drain a pull-up jumper.
"Honestly, other than the [three] freshmen, I think they were pretty well together anyway,'' Huggins said Monday.
So, bonding aside, did West Virginia gain much from last week's island excursion, which included three exhibition games against sloppy opponents who were outscored by an average of nearly 50 points per game?
Well, yes and no.
"[We found out] pretty much what we already knew. We're going to score in flurries,'' Huggins said. "I think it was 15-13 [in one of the games] and then it was 51-15 or something like that. I think it's just the cumulative effect of us playing so many people and keeping fresh guys on the floor. It wears people down.''
Indeed, that much was pretty much a given. Huggins used the word so many times last season that instead of Press Virginia the nickname, although not nearly as catchy, could easily have been the Cumulatives.
Perhaps just as predictable were a few other things, like fouls and shooting and transition. Huggins complained that his team generally was lousy in that last aspect, spotty in the second and frustrated in the first.
"The last team we played shot about 63 foul shots,'' he said. "It might have been a hundred if they'd made some of them.''
Again, nothing new there, right? West Virginia made it to the Sweet 16 a year ago despite never quite mastering how to turn turnovers into points (transition), shooting erratically and playing what were statistically the most foul-plagued games of any team in the country.
The transition and shooting issues can be dealt with, at least to a point, in practice. Whether the foul problem works itself out is a huge question.
"I'm still trying to figure out how the game is going to be officiated,'' Huggins said of the season to come. "It's a little alarming when all the [officiating] points of emphasis come out and it looks like they pointed them all to us.''
Again, though, none of that was going to be corrected or even significantly addressed during a five-day trip to paradise. This was more about simply getting a feel for what things will look like in a few months sans the team's two seniors last year, Juwan Staten and Gary Browne, and getting a head start on formulating it.
And there seem to have been a couple of pleasant surprises.
The first was the play of freshman point guard James "Beetle'' Bolden, who along with Carter and Dax Miles were the only ones in the rotation who had a positive assist-to-turnover ratio in three sloppy games that produced an average of 26 WVU turnovers per game and a staggering 45 by the those opponents.
"Honestly, the guy who made the best decisions in transition those three games was Beetle,'' Huggins said. "Beetle did a much better job than our returning guys in terms of decision making and getting the ball to the right people and us being able to finish. You would have thought that [Carter] and Tarik [Phillip] would have been better. I think he's pretty good with the ball.
"His problem is going to be what Lamont's problem is. The physicality is hard for them because neither one of them weigh anything.''
Conspicuous by his absence in the discussion about being physically mature and strong leads to the other pleasant surprise, which really isn't as much a surprise as an affirmation. Freshman Esa Ahmad can play.
Ahmad was fourth in a deep, 10-man rotation in minutes played and only Carter, at 18.7, averaged more than Ahmad's 14 points per game. He was also second to Devin Williams in rebounding. He didn't shoot particularly well except around the basket - that was particularly glaring in his 10-for-21 free-throw performance - but he seems quite ready to step into a major role, even physically.
"I don't think he does [have a strength issues],'' Huggins said of Ahmad, the 6-foot-8, 225-pounder from the Cleveland suburbs. "He's going to be a lot strong [on a weight program] obviously, but he [held his own]. He plays through contact better than a lot of our returning guys.
"He didn't shoot it very well, but I don't think anybody thought he would. He's trying to figure out where he should be.''
Ditto Ahmad's spot in WVU's press, which could benefit greatly from his length.
"When we got him to the right spot he was pretty good,'' Huggins said. "He's got a great feel for basketball, so he anticipates things better than what some other guys do.
"He made some really good plays. He made some bad plays, too, but he made some pretty good plays.''
Reach Dave Hickman at 304-348-1734 or dphickman1@aol.com or follow him at Twitter.com/dphickman1.