Published: May 18, 2008 11:48 pm      

Ebanks not just another prospect

MORGANTOWN — Welcome to the big leagues, West Virginia.

You beat out Memphis for the best available unsigned high school prospect left this year, a top five player at his position, a top 10 or 15 player in the country, and he’s yours.

Bob Huggins promised to change the profile of the program when he came home, and he’s delivered.

Big time.

Devin Ebanks isn’t just another signing. You won’t be seeing lines in future stories about recruits choosing the Mountaineers that read:

“The Mountaineers beat out Fairleigh Dickinson, Wright State and Illinois Central for his services.”

Now it’s Memphis and Texas who are coming in second and third.

Ebank is the highest profile kid to come to West Virginia since — and, oh, how it hurts to mention this name — Jonathan Hargett.

He comes with just as much talent and far less baggage, with no scandal swirling around him.

Ebank is an 18-year-old kid who is brought to build a program while Hargett was a recruit brought in to help an aging coach take one final crack at the one thing he missed out on, a Final Four appearance.

Ebanks originally signed with Indiana by Kelvin Sampson, who was dismissed for going beyond his cell phone limit of minutes.

When Sampson left, Ebanks asked for and received his release from his letter of intent, putting his 6-foot-9, 205-pound frame out there on the meat market that is college recruiting.

He comes out of St. Thomas More School in Oakdale, Conn., a prep school where he averaged 23 points, 10 rebounds and five assists, but his roots are planted firmly in the New York area, which makes this a signing of great import to West Virginia.

In recent years, Ben Howland, and then Jamie Dixon, have owned the New York recruiting market at Pitt.

No more.

Dick Weiss, whose nickname is “Hoops” for his knowledge of the game as the college basketball columnist for the New York Daily News, put it this way after the signing:

“West Virginia coach Bob Huggins and assistant Billy Hahn may be taking over where Pitt left off in our area. The Mountaineers signed 6-8 forward Kevin Jones of Mt. Vernon, guard Truck Bryant of St. Ray’s and now Ebanks, who is one of the top 25 prospects in the country.”

Huggins also has recruited Roscoe Davis of Marlboro, Md., in this class.

The way Huggins is bringing New York kids into Morgantown I’m thinking of opening a West Virginia branch of the Carnegie Deli. It’s even possible that Huggins will push to have the PRT run underground instead of on an overhead monorail, just so his kids feel at home as if they were riding the IRT line to Jerome Avenue in the Bronx to see a New York Yankees game.

The importance of this signing for Huggins can not be underestimated. True, he had a reputation as a great recruiter at Cincinnati, but it’s one thing to get city kids to come into a major metropolitan area like Cincinnati and quite another thing to convince to come to our little neck of the woods.

It’s pretty tough to sell the Buckwheat Festival as an event to someone who has spent New Year’s Eve in Times Square with 600,000 of their closest friends.

But Huggins has pulled it off and done so at just the right moment.

It appears that forward Joe Alexander is about to make his exit into the real world, most scouts and draft sites predicting that he will be a Top 20 pick in the NBA draft, going perhaps as high as No. 12 or No. 13.

It was a meteoric rise, considering that a year under John Beilein he couldn’t get on the court toward the end of the season, and he knows it could be a once-in-a-lifetime moment to cash in on his spectacular athletic ability.

If Alexander, who put the Mountaineers on his back and carried them down the stretch last year, does decide to stay in the draft and hire an agent, the Mountaineers really didn’t have a replacement for him.

Now they do with Ebank.

He’s a kid with size who can shoot from the outside, who can rebound and can learn to do much of what Alexander did last year.

“Devin gives us a very versatile scorer who can score in multiple ways,” Huggins said in a release put out by the school. “At 6-foot-9, he’s an outstanding perimeter shooter with size and mobility.”

If Alexander comes back, great, go ahead and buy those Final Four tickets now for the Mountaineers will have experience and ability while adding Ebanks and Kevin Jones, who also is a budding star.

And, if Alexander doesn’t come back, his loss has now been softened to the point that Ebank and Wellington Smith can take up the slack, playing with Joe Mazzulla, Alex Ruoff, De’Sean Butler, John Flowers and Jones.

“On his visit, he fit in terrific with our team,” Huggins said. “Our guys like him and look forward to playing with him. I think these four players give us an outstanding recruiting class. We have four guys who will be outstanding Big East players and who will keep us in the national picture.”

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.