The 2009-2010 West Virginia Mountaineers have all the ingredients to produce a powerhouse men’s basketball team, one that may take the program to a place it hasn’t been since Jerry West carried WVU all the way to the 1959 national championship game, before falling a point short of California.

“We’re looking for the Big East championship and we’re also looking for a national championship,” said senior forward/center Wellington Smith. “With the team we have right now, anything less is a disappointment.”

Head coach Bob Huggins, the fourth active winningest coach in college basketball, who has collected a remarkable 635 career wins, has assembled a talented team with depth at all positions.

WVU has been to the NCAA tournament four of the past five years, reaching the Sweet 16 three times. In the 2006-2007 season the Mountaineers were on the cusp on the NCAA tournament, but instead captured an NIT championship. Winning 22 or more games, finishing in the upper echelon of the boisterous Big East, navigating deep postseason runs and earning top 25 final rankings are becoming commonplace in Morgantown.

For the coming season, WVU is being touted as a preseason top 10, if not top 5 team, as well as a favorite to finish among the top of the Big East.

“That’s where we got to get to -- where we’re one of the two of three teams mentioned every year that’s going to win the league because if you can win our league, you can win a national championship.” said Huggins.

This year, the Mountaineers will showcase a top shelf tandem of frontcourt players, led by senior power forward Da’Sean Butler and sophomore sensation small forward Devin Ebanks.

Butler said of Ebanks, who’s improved play heated up to a near boiling point during the second half of last season, “I pass him the ball and I stay out of the way.

“Honestly, he’s just unbelievably talented. He can do a lot with the basketball. He just has a knack for scoring, sometimes at will.”

Ebanks, a 6-foot-9, 215 pound player from Long Island City, N.Y., said, “My confidence is real high right now. Coach Huggins put a lot of trust in me right now. I have expectation.”

Expectation surrounded the treasured Ebanks, who was originally bound for Indiana but was released once IU head coach Kelvin Sampson resigned in the midst of illegal recruiting charges, the moment he touched ground in Morgantown. Putting an exclamation point on his official arrival to college basketball stardom was his one-handed emphatic slam dunk over Pitt’s Jermaine Dixon, helping WVU upset the No. 2-ranked Panthers during the second round of the Big East tournament, inside Madison Square Garden.

“That January-February period, I started to get it,” Ebanks said.

Together, Butler and Ebanks combined to average 27 points and 13 rebounds last season, with Butler carrying the larger scoring load ahead of Ebanks, who was then just a freshman. This season, the two figure to pick up where they left off a year ago, with Ebanks’ potential skyrocketing game by game.

“I don’t think I see that many one-two punches like that in our conference,” Butler said.

Back from a season ending shoulder injury is  junior point guard Joe Mazzulla. Sophomore Truck Bryant, who played in place of Mazzulla, re-joined the team after being reinstated this summer following a team suspension for traffic-related charges. Both will take on significant roles this season.

“Truck shoots it better than Joe does. At this point, Joe probably defends better than what Truck does,” said Huggins. “They bring different things. If you play them both together, you’re a lot harder to pressure.”

The Mountaineers are replacing shooting guard Alex Ruoff, who graduated as the schools’ all-time leader in three-pointers made (261).

But last year’s junior college player of the year, Casey Mitchell, of Chipola College (Marianna, Fla.), along with heralded recruit Dalton Pepper, of Pennsbury High School, in the greater Philadelphia, Pa., area, figure to pick up the slack from Ruoff’s departure.

“Really, we didn’t have a backup for Alex, a year ago,” Huggins said. “Now with Casey and Pep [Pepper], we’ve got two guys that are pretty good at that position.”

Smith said, “Casey is a pure scorer. He came out as a baby, probably was dropping buckets in the Fischer Price [basket].

But Huggins explained two sides of Mitchell that he may show, especially early on in his WVU career.

“In all honesty, I think there’s going to be days when people walk out of here and say he’s the best scoring guard since Wil Robinson,” explained the coach. Robinson was a guard at WVU during the early 1970s who averaged better than 24 points a game.

“And then there’s other days their going to walk out of here and say, ‘What the hell they recruit him for?’”

Huggins expects Mitchell to undergo a transition period before he starts to make the impact he did in junior college. “For whatever anybody wants to say, it’s a heck of a step from Chipola to playing in the Big East. He’s going to experience growing pains like everybody else has.”

Two other new faces who will likely earn playing time this season will give the Mountaineers an instant boost of physical play down low beneath the basket. “We have been kind of outmatched physically, really in the past couple years,” said Huggins. I think that’s getting ready to change.”

That change may come in the form of 6-foot-9, 265 pound forward Deniz Kilicli, of Istanbul, Turkey, who played at Beckley’s Mountain State Academy, and Dan Jennings, a 6-foot-8, 260 pound forward from St. Thomas More School (home of Ebanks), in Staten Island, N.Y.

“Deniz is very skilled,” Smith said. “He is a huge body just like the guys we play in the Big East. Whenever he can play, he is definitely going to be a problem.”

Smith continued, “So is Danny. He can jump out the gym. If I had to compare him, I’d be like [former NBA all-star] Shawn Kemp because of how he can jump.”

Before Kilicli and Jennings get fully acclimated to the college game, Smith, a senior and returning starter at forward/center, provides help for the interior part of WVU’s defense. Smith is 6-foot-7, but plays bigger than his height -- he’s fifth all-time on WVU’s shot blocking list for his 124 rejections. This season, Smith is chasing history, trying to top D’or Fischer’s 190 all-time shot blocks.

“I know the blocked shots record is a pretty big deal, but I’m not looking forward to it,” said Smith. “I’m looking more forward to our team getting further and what we want to do.”

Huggins said he would like to be able to get as many as 13 different players in games throughout the season. That type of depth is basically unheard of, but WVU certainly does possess a potent arsenal of players.

“We have a lot of weapons,” Ebanks said. “I’ve seen a lot more weapons on the offensive end. We have a bunch of shooters, a lot of in between guys. We got power down low, so this team is very interesting.”

Huggins has commented previously about needing a minimum of three NBA-ready players on a roster in order to make a Final Four run and ultimately win a national championship.

“Ten players on our team definitely have a chance of playing professional basketball -- NBA or overseas,” said Butler. “Easily.”

So on paper and based on previous results, WVU appears to yield hardly any shortcomings. But no team is perfect, of course.

“We’ll have weaknesses,” Smith said. “As much experience that we do have, there’s always a mentality that we may lack -- a mental aspect that we may lack. But it’s also something that can be gained.

Expounding on sustaining a winning mentality, Smith explained, “During practice, it’s definitely going to be tested because of how long it is -- how long practice is, how long the season is.”

Huggins, like most, sees the potential this group has. Three years since taking over the program, this may be his best team yet, at WVU. “I think it has a chance to be,” he said.

The Mountaineers open up the season on Nov. 15, against Loyola University Maryland, at the WVU Coliseum.

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