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25 February 2010
MORGANTOWN - Give Bob Huggins an opening to talk about Da'Sean Butler and what he means to West Virginia's eighth-ranked basketball team and he'll pounce on it.
The direction Huggins will take, though, is always a mystery.
He might go the versatility route and wonder aloud how many players could seamlessly morph from a shooting guard to a small forward to a point guard and then to an inside banger - quite often not simply in the same game, but in one possession.
Or Huggins might play off of that versatility and go more directly to the point, which is because Butler can do so many things he is without question West Virginia's most valuable player and the biggest reason for the success of a team that has spent all of two weeks this season ranked outside of the Top 10.
More than likely, though, the West Virginia coach will talk about Butler's work ethic, as he did a few weeks ago.
"There's nobody who wants to win more than Da'Sean does,'' Huggins said. "And there's nobody who works harder at it than him.''
There's a reason for all of Butler's hard work, though - one that might surprise even Huggins.
"It's him, because I can't do it by myself,'' Butler said. "I'm lazy. I am. If you ask me to come in here and do something by myself I wouldn't. I'd be messing around. I definitely need somebody over top of me to make sure I'm doing what I need to be doing. And that's what he does.''
It would be almost impossible to prove based on some of his most recent games, but Butler was recruited to play at West Virginia because he could shoot the basketball. Impossible because that's pretty much the only thing the 6-foot-7 senior hasn't been doing well of late.
Only three times in West Virginia's last 16 games has Butler made more shots than he's missed. Monday night, in a loss at Connecticut, he was 2-for-10. But given that he was a career 47-percent shooter before that slide, it's just as impossible to think that his current shooting woes - including a baffling inability to make free throws - is anything more than a normal slump.
