West Virginia basketball gets its first real test of the preseason on Sunday, and there’s no shortage of angles to watch when the Mountaineers meet Maryland in College Park.
Tipoff is set for 3 p.m. on Big 10+, with WVU opening a slate of three exhibition games before the regular season. Maryland already has one tune-up under its belt after beating Georgia Tech, 85-70, last Sunday, and the Terrapins come in at No. 53 in KenPom’s preseason rankings.
The game also gives fans an immediate look at one of the most intriguing guard matchups on the schedule. Kaden House and Miles Sadler are back on the same floor after their meeting in March in the EYBL Scholastic championship game, when House’s AZ Compass Prep team and Sadler’s CIA Bella Vista squad met in a battle of top-tier programs.
CIA Bella Vista won that matchup, 69-65, to claim the EYBL Scholastic conference title, and Sadler filled the box score with 24 points, 5 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 steals on 9-for-14 shooting. House answered with 23 points, 5 rebounds, 4 assists and 7 stocks.
Now they get their next round at the college level.
House also made a strong first impression in Maryland’s exhibition, scoring 14 points and collecting two steals while looking like the best defender on the team. That caught plenty of people off guard, though it didn’t surprise everyone.
West Virginia’s frontcourt will also be under the microscope. Brenen Lorient is already a known piece, but the bigger question is how the 5 spot holds up.
Maryland’s size is built to punish teams inside and on the glass. Pharrel Payne, the 6-foot-9, 250-pound center, has been one of the better offensive rebounders in the country over the last three years and is the kind of post threat who wants to bury his defender on the block.
He’s also one of the nation’s best at drawing fouls. Alongside him is Tomislav Buljan, another 6-foot-9, 250-pound transfer, this one from New Mexico, who was one of the nation’s best rounders as a true freshman last year.
In other words, this is old school Buzz Williams basketball: miss shots, then go get them back.
That makes WVU’s own bigs, Mouhamed Sylla and Amadou Seini, worth watching from the opening tip. Both are strong rebounders.
Sylla, a former top-20 recruit, was a force on the glass as a true freshman at Georgia Tech before injury, and Seini was probably the best rebounder in the entire class of 2026 outside of perhaps Marcis Ponder. Against Maryland, we should find out pretty quickly what they’re made of.
Offensively, the Mountaineers should give another clue about what this team wants to be. Last season’s exhibition against Wheeling leaned heavily on the short roll and high-low action, and that carried over more often as the 2025 season unfolded. That suggests Hodge will show real structure here, not just vanilla preseason offense.
The frontcourt should still feature plenty of high-low work, especially with Lorient and Sylla as natural fits for that style. But the backcourt may reveal even more.
Miles Sadler is a pick-and-roll savant and a constant paint toucher, so the volume of high ball screens around him will tell us plenty about how WVU plans to function. Finley Bizjack is another name to watch.
He won’t move off the ball like Honor Huff, so the question is how much of his shot diet comes off screens, how much he gets on the ball, and how often Sadler sets the table for him.
Joson Sanon is another piece to track in that same space. He was at his best as a scorer at Arizona State, and at times at St.
John’s, when he was being run off Zoom DHOs - a down screen into dribble handoff - to get him moving downhill. Sanon was also in that action at practice a few weeks ago, so there’s a good chance it shows up Sunday.
Tempo will matter, too. Sadler’s freedom to push the pace should tell us something about how fast WVU wants to play, and this roster has plenty of athletes to work with.
Defensively, the freshman big men are impossible to ignore. Seini has the kind of measurables that jump off the page: 7-foot-1, a 7-foot-5 wingspan and a 9-foot-3 standing reach.
In drop coverage, he should be a problem. The bigger question is how quickly he absorbs the broader principles of West Virginia’s no middle defense.
That same challenge applies to Sylla. Both have the physical tools to be elite, but they can’t get turned around in a scheme that asks for quick processing.
Bizjack and Sanon are also worth watching on that end, because both have been rough defenders to this point in their careers. Hodge will need to bring that side of their game along, just as he did to a degree with Treysen Eaglestaff.
Sadler’s defensive role may be just as important as his work with the ball. At 5-foot-11, he’ll be the smallest piece in the middle of a no middle defense that leans on him as the “Basketball Ninja” at the top. He led the EYBL Peach Jam in steals per game in 2025 and is widely viewed as a strong point-of-attack defender, but the size question is real and he’ll have to learn the system quickly.
There are a few other rotation wrinkles to keep an eye on, too. Utah transfer Seydou Traore could be in line for a bigger role than expected and might even start over Sanon at the 3.
The depth chart should tighten once conference play arrives, and Traore looks like one of the names in the mix for that logjam. It will also be worth seeing whether Aliou Dioum or Keonte Greybear gets second-half minutes.
My current read is that Martin Somerville backs up Sadler at the point, while Bizjack spends most of his time at the 2, and Somerville looks like a strong defensive fit for the Jasper Floyd role. Sunday should start to confirm a lot of that.
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