MORGANTOWN — At some point, as the story goes, Brenen Lorient goes up to Jasper Floyd before tipoff and lets his teammate in on a little secret.
“He tells me everyday prior to the game that he’s going to crash as hard as he can,” Floyd said. “That’s not even, like, you’re not worried about his effort.”
Crash, as in crashing the boards and hoarding rebounds as if they were bricks of gold that Lorient piles up off into some corner.
There were any number of topics that came out of West Virginia’s 70-54 opening victory Tuesday night against Mount St. Mary’s, which provided head coach Ross Hodge his first victory as WVU’s head coach.
None were as impressive as the night Lorient, a 6-foot-9 forward out of Ocala, Fla., had in his first showing as a Power Conference athlete.
Let’s begin with this stat: WVU finished with just 29 rebounds. Lorient had nearly half of them with 13.
Now, there have been some terrific rebounders over the years at WVU, from Kevin Jones to Damian Owens to Warren Baker. You may have to go all the way back to the legendary Jerry West to find a time when one WVU player grabbed nearly half of his team’s rebounds in one game.
To Lorient, that was no big deal.
“I feel like when you go to the rebound column, it should be more about the group as a whole,” Lorient said. “Obviously there were a lot of loose balls, 50-50 balls that we need to get in big games to win. I feel like as a group, we need to go back and work on that.”
There was a more lasting impression made by Lorient than just his work on the glass. Make no mistake, he is West Virginia’s X-factor, the guy who may never lead the team in scoring, but needs to play just as many – if not more – minutes than the guy who does.
“I thought he did a good job, especially late in the second half, of just imposing his will,” Hodge said of Lorient.
If there are comparisons to be made, think of Lorient as a slightly taller John Flowers-type guy from the 2009-10 Final Four season, with the exception being Lorient is going to be a bigger part of WVU’s scoring equation than Flowers was that season.
That was evident coming out of a couple of timeouts, when Hodge took his best shooters and basically used them as decoys to spread out the defense. Meanwhile, Floyd and Lorient basically turned a pick-and-roll into Floyd lobbing the ball to Lorient for an easy lay-up.
“It’s something we like to run with those guys and we felt the timing of it was good,” Hodge said. “They’ve executed that a lot. B-Lo (Lorient) is such a good athlete, that if he gets behind the defense, you can literally just throw it to the rim.”
There is a smoothness to Lorient’s motion, a toughness in his rebounding and defense and just the overall sense from watching him once that he’s not going to have much trouble at all making the adjustment from North Texas to playing against the big boys in the Big 12.
The book is still out on others. Honor Huff can really shoot, but will he be able to match up physically once Big 12 play begins? Treysen Eaglestaff can score, but will he be able to defend in the Big 12? Harlan Obioha is a big boy who can move, but he’s not a shot blocker, so will Big 12 guards hesitate at all driving the ball inside? If they don’t, foul trouble could become an issue down the road.
Lorient, though, there seems to be no question. He’s a Big 12-caliber player and defender in a 6-foot-9 frame. To that point, so is Floyd, who is a physical 6-3 point guard. Both guys followed Hodge from North Texas to WVU.
There is no “best lineup” Hodge can put on the floor that probably doesn’t include those two players. Whether the WVU coach wants to go small or big, at the very least, Lorient has to be out there.
Lorient was out there for 35 minutes on Tuesday. During those 35 minutes, WVU was a plus 20 in scoring margin against Mount St. Mary’s. The other five, well, they weren’t quite as memorable.
And then throw in those rebounds. When you grab nearly half of your team’s rebounds in one game, it’s either extremely impressive or concerning.
To Lorient, it was sort of both.
“It feels good for sure,” Lorient said. “It just doesn’t add up.”
