MORGANTOWN - Elijah Macon is out, and the centerpiece of West Virginia's frontcourt creates a 6-foot-9, 240-pound vacancy some freshmen and sophomores will attempt to fill. But Jevon Carter is back, and all respect due to Macon for the way he matured and then flourished late in his third and final season with the Mountaineers, this is a much, much bigger deal.
WVU has players on the roster and on the way who will battle one another for permission to succeed, simulate and supersede Macon. WVU has no one like Carter. Few teams do, and that's about to become abundantly clear.
"This is pretty much his team, and they're all looking for his leadership," said Mountaineers assistant Larry Harrison, who works with the guards and who recruited Carter out of Maywood, Illinois.
WVU will have two seniors next season, and what Carter and Dax Miles have in common with tenure is offset by achievements.
Carter will be first-team preseason all-Big 12 and could be the preseason player of the year. Those are opinions, but so was the idea that he's the best defensive player in the country. That became fact when he was crowned as such by the National Association of Basketball Coaches.
That's an earned and deserved honor, even if it wasn't truly surprising to the people who recruited Carter, but it overshadows what Carter has done on the other end of the floor. He's transitioned from shooting guard to point guard, he's involved teammates, he's come up with ways to manufacture space for shots and drives and he's become an accurate 3-point shooter.
He's now in charge of a team known for defense but defined at times by offensive woes that just cannot continue if the Mountaineers are to reach the heights Carter no doubt desires now that he's back on campus.
"He's probably ahead of where we thought he'd be, and that has a lot to do with his work ethic," Harrison said. "When we recruited him, we really liked his defensive ability and his work on the defensive end. He could make some shots, but we didn't look at him as a shot-maker, which he is now.
"If you'd say, 'Did you ever think he'd be where he's at today?' it'd be very easy for me to say yes, but that wouldn't be true."
In his first three seasons, Carter averaged 8.1, 9.5 and 13.5 points per game, but maybe that comes with an increase in profile and playing time. Carter has nevertheless shot 36, 38.3 and 43.9 percent from the floor and 31.4, 30.6 and 38.9 percent from 3-point range. Asked to be the point guard as a sophomore, he averaged 3.3 assists. Last year, it was 3.7, and just for fun, because he decided he had to do it, he averaged 5 rebounds after averaging 2.3 and 2.9 his first two years.
Carter's self-help habits are becoming the stuff of legend, probably the closest thing we've had around here since Joe Alexander decided to extend late-night workouts at the Coliseum as long as possible and then sleep on a sofa in the players' lounge. Carter arrives early and stays after practices. He's at the practice facility on off days, and that would include the night before the national championship game in April.
As his mother explained in a Facebook post, she worried about her son's drive and told him to give himself a break because he didn't have a game the next day.
"Gonzaga does," he replied.
That's Carter, and that's what people on the roster and teams on the schedule better understand. He may never get over the loss to Gonzaga, and now he's been told he's not quite good enough for the NBA combine, never mind the draft.
Watch out, everybody.
"If he would have been invited to the combine, I definitely think he would have opened some eyes, but I think he now has the mindset that people didn't know who he was when he came here and he's set on making sure they know who he is when he leaves," Harrison said.
Carter isn't back for individual honors or to make good on the tips he got from the NBA. He's back to triumph in the regular season and in the postseason, to win the Big 12 tournament after two championship-game losses, to make sure a key possession or a big shot in an NCAA tournament game works out for the Mountaineers after their disorganized exit in the Sweet Sixteen.
There is no way he'll allow the limitations of others to hold him back, but that's going to be a challenge he'll have to manage. There's Carter and Miles in the backcourt and there's junior Esa Ahmad playing on the wing, but WVU will need two starters and a handful of others to give the team the rotation it needs to play the defense for which it's known.
No matter the lineups, Carter will be bringing people up to speed - his speed, to be sure - because only Lamont West and Sagaba Konate played 400 minutes and averaged more than 10 minutes a game last season. Guards Beetle Bolden and Chase Harler and forward Maciej Bender combined to play 399 minutes. That's not a lot more than freshmen Brandon Knapper, Teddy Allen and Derek Culver and junior college transfers D'Angelo Hunter and Wesley Harris have played.
"Because Jevon's gone through it, he's got to make sure those guys understand some days are going to be better than others, and he can't just let them give up, so to speak, when things get hard - because Jevon isn't going to do that," Harrison said. "We as coaches are going to be hard on him, and he's not going to get preferential treatment, and I think the guys will see him go through it and do what he needs to do to be successful and realize that's what they need to do."
Contact Mike Casazza at 304-319-1142 or mikec@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @mikecasazza and read his blog at http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/wvu/.