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24 March 2010
SYRACUSE, N.Y. - West Virginia flew here by plane Tuesday and took a bus to the team's hotel, but the sixth-ranked Mountaineers will be without their Truck for the remainder of the season.
Starting point guard Darryl "Truck" Bryant suffered a serious injury to his right foot in practice Tuesday just before the team left campus, sources told the Daily Mail, which was first to report the story.
"He's not even sure how it happened," said one person, who called it a "freak" occurrence.
WVU later confirmed Bryant broke the fifth metatarsal. He won't play for the Mountaineers (29-6), seeded second in the West Region, in Thursday's 7:27 p.m. Sweet Sixteen game against No. 11 seed Washington in the Carrier Dome.
"He thinks he did it in the game Sunday (against Missouri)," Coach Bob Huggins said Tuesday night. "He said it was sore Sunday. He got treatment Monday and we didn't do much other than watch a whole lot of (Washington's) film Monday. He was backpedaling (Tuesday) and he said he felt something snap."
Bryant, a 6-foot-2 sophomore from Brooklyn, N.Y., started 31 games this season, including the past 23 after coming off the bench for four games earlier. Bryant was bothered at the time by a bad ankle and a sore groin and WVU opted for a starting lineup with five forwards.
Bryant averaged 9.3 points and had 108 assists to 71 turnovers while shooting 34.6 percent from the floor and 31.5 percent from 3-point range. He shot 37.7 percent from 3-point range as a freshman.
Bryant struggled the past six game games and totaled only 14 points. He missed his final 12 3-point attempts of the season and 24 of 28, but did make back-to-back layups in an important stretch of the second half of Sunday's second-round victory against No. 10 seed Missouri.
Bryant will likely be replaced in the starting lineup by Joe Mazzulla, whose shoulder injury last season ushered Bryant into the starting lineup, though Huggins wasn't sure how he'd respond.
"I don't know," he said. "Honestly, the silver lining, I guess, is we've been through this before."
