NEW YORK - With just over two minutes to play Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden, No. 6 West Virginia's 79-60 win over St. John's was ready to be put into the books. The only variable in an odd game in which the Mountaineers trailed by 16 and led by 21 - a statistic made even odder by the fact that only 17 minutes separated the two - was the final score.

Fittingly, it was Da'Sean Butler who had the basketball as the clock wound down. He was maybe 23 feet from the basket and St. John's forward Sean Evans was all but in Butler's shirt.

On this day, though, that was playing right into his hands.

"I just put it up to be putting it up,'' Butler said of the ensuing shot with Evans in his grill. "At that point, why not?''

It was shortly after that last of his seven 3-pointers swished through that Butler finally took a seat for the first time in the game. A small, polite crowd of 6,157 - seemingly half of them WVU fans there to see the team's five New York-area starters - gave Butler a standing ovation. New York fans are, if nothing else, appreciative of a great performance, and this was Butler's finest in what is becoming a pretty fine senior season.

Despite a first-half funk in which neither he nor his teammates could do anything right, Butler scored 33 points, had six assists and was a perfect 7-for-7 from 3-point range.

When that last one went through, Butler staggered backward at the end of his follow through and smiled at Evans. Evans didn't smile back.

"They were just my kind of shots,'' Butler said of his second-best scoring day ever.

Well, perhaps, but they were also the same shots that for much of the last month haven't been going in for Butler. Although he had shown flashes of breaking out of his shooting slump in recent games - he had 27 points in a win over Louisville a week ago - it was still only the second time in the last 11 games that the 6-foot-7 senior made at least half his shots in a game.

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