West Virginia’s Darian DeVries is experiencing being a power-five head coach for the first time. It’s a difficult assignment, but now it has been made more difficult because his son Tucker, a 6-foot-7 senior guard who is the team’s second-leading scorer at 14.9 points per game, is out indefinitely with an upper body injury. DeVries also played for his father at Drake, where he was the Bulldogs’ leading scorer for three straight years. When his father took the West Virginia job last spring, Tucker came with him. Tucker entered this season as a preseason AP All-American nominee and was placed on the Wooden award watch list.

DeVries missed just two games during his first three seasons. He also missed a significant portion of the summer after undergoing shoulder surgery, although the school has not said whether his current condition is related to that. “With Tucker we’ll just continue to rely on the medical team to tell us what needs to happen,” Darian DeVries said earlier this week. 

In his eight games prior to the injury, Tucker DeVries averaged 14.9 points, 4.9 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game on 41.2 percent shooting from the field as well as 47.3% shooting from three-point range. Those eight games included a 16-point win in an upset over No. 3 Gonzaga in overtime at the Battle 4 Atlantis. DeVries also scored a team-high 26 points in a win over Arizona. 

The primary challenge for the Mountaineers will be to maintain their confidence without one of their most important players. “[Coach DeVries] told us ‘the expectation doesn’t change, everything is still the same,’” freshman guard KJ Tenner said. “It’s not just going to take one person to replace Tuck, it’s gonna take all of us.” 

The Mountaineers have won twice since DeVries went out, but those wins came against teams ranked No. 270 and 290 on KenPom, respectively. Without DeVries’ offensive production, West Virginia will have to rely even more heavily on its defense, which is ranked 30th on KenPom in adjusted defensive efficiency. “We just still continue to play,” sophomore guard Sincere Harris said. “We just keep playing defense hard. As we continue to play defense hard as a team the more we’re connected. These guys are able to guard at a high level so we ain’t missing nothing [without DeVries].”

The emergence of 6-foot-3 senior guard Javon Small, a transfer from Oklahoma State who is averaging a team-best 19.3 points per game, is making things easier. “It’s his team,” Darian DeVries said. “We would love to get Javon off the ball a little bit with KJ [Tenner] at the point…That’s one thing we would love to do because we can just free him up for some different opportunities as opposed to him coming down every time and letting the defenses load up on him.”

Small knows that he’ll have some added pressure, but that isn’t changing his mindset. “I know I gotta do a little bit extra, but at the same time I just do whatever my team needs me to do,” he said. “[DeVries’ absence] is definitely something we gotta get used to…The flow of the offense will get better.”

DeVries was a great luxury to have because he is so adept at manufacturing his own offense. Small has those capabilities, too, but moving forward the Mountaineers’ offense, which ranks 71st in adjusted offensive efficiency per KenPom, will have to be more of a collective effort. “Spacing and cutting and moving and passing, those are the things we’ll continue to work on,” Darian DeVries said. 

There won’t be any easing into the season for West Virginia and its new coach. After playing Mercyhurst in Morgantown on Sunday, West Virginia opens Big 12 play at Kansas on Dec. 31.