MORGANTOWN - What you want to do is dismiss Tuesday night's final score and 25 of the 40 minutes that preceded the final buzzer that announced No. 10 Virginia as a 16-point winner. What you want to do is reserve harsh judgments and insist West Virginia is better than it was in the Jimmy V Classic and as good as it was in the seven games before it.
All of that would be fair. The Cavaliers are a savvy, top-flight team with a proven way of winning. The 14th-ranked Mountaineers ought not panic after a 70-54 loss at Madison Square Garden, the first setback of the season but the first game against truly legitimate competition, because this still looks a lot like a team that won 25 games last season and made the Sweet Sixteen.
That's not necessarily a good thing, though. WVU still can't shoot the basketball. The Mountaineers still limp through long stretches of unsavory offense. The coach still can't explain it. The Mountaineers still can't escape it.
The offense was bad and affected the defense, because the Mountaineers can't press when they don't make baskets. It's like owning a Corvette in a town where it snows all the time. WVU has a sports car defense and an ice storm offense.
This is not a new problem, either. WVU shot it sideways and stumbled through scoreless stretches last season, but there were explanations and cause for patience. There were seven first-year players, and Bob Huggins was teaching each of them and five others how to press, trap and swarm the full length of the court.
They were obsessed with defense, and that hindered the offense. It taxed legs and shooting motions, and time spent on the press in practice was time not spent on half-court offense and zone busters and floating around screens to step into jumpers.
Now, there was that fantastic $24 million practice building, and there were constant reminders from Huggins that this players should maybe think about hanging out there more often.
Six of the seven first-year players came back this season. Four of the starters are two- or three-year veterans, and the one who's perhaps the best scorer and maybe the best athlete is usually first off the bench. Just about everyone looks like they're a page torn out of a fitness magazine. They all know where the practice building is, too.
But if there's one thing to take away from the misfire at Madison Square Garden, it's not that the Mountaineers won't or can't beat good teams or that they're not as good as their ranking. It's that this new season has the familiar frustration.
The Mountaineers are shooting 48.1 percent from the floor, a number inflated by easy baskets against the pinatas they've played so far, and 27 percent from 3-point range. Offenses get better during a season, right? Well, so do opponents, and the schedule is about to get real now for the Mountaineers.
Consider the prior five full seasons after the 2010 Final Four: the Mountaineers shot 40.8 percent from the floor, 31.6 percent from 3-point range last season, preceded by 43.9 and 38.1, 40.8 and 31.6, 43.8 and 29.8 and 42.9 and 33.7.
Not a lot of progressing in those seasons.
Only two players have shot 40 percent from 3-point range the past five years, and Eron Harris and Terry Henderson play for Michigan State and North Carolina State now - Harris not very well for the top-ranked Spartans, Henderson not at all for the Wolfpack because of an ankle injury.
"We take bad shots," Huggins said. "I think we take shots out of rhythm and we take shots off balance and we don't do a very good job stepping into shots."
And that's the rub. The Mountaineers are extremely and capably self-aware. They've been hit over the head about their shooting, in come cases literally when a bad shot fires off the front of the rim and at their domes.
For 17 minutes Tuesday, they worked around their weaknesses. The offense moved about the floor, and constant motion wouldn't let the Cavaliers pack the lane. Forwards stepped outside and found their way inside, other forwards were cutting in from angles and baskets were coming easily.
The Mountaineers took seven 3-point shots in the first half. Two went in and none were so offensive that Huggins called for a substitute.
It was good for a 12-point lead. There was nothing wrong with it. Then WVU totally abandoned it. The lead was cut in half by halftime, and inexplicably the first three shots of the second half were 3-pointers.
Those three and the four that followed all missed, and a few were so poorly considered that Huggins had to remind or beg players to drive to the basket - which worked, by the way, when top sub Jaysean Paige started from the top and went straight to the basket for a bucket.
"If we're going to shoot it that bad, we probably shouldn't shoot it," Huggins said.