Rutgers senior perfect in romp Rutgers 87 W. Virginia 61Defining a perfect game in basketball is not an exact science, but Rutgers forward Rob Hodgson gave a pretty good example of one yesterday during the Scarlet Knights’ 87-61 thrashing of West Virginia yesterday in front of 8,503 at the RAC.

Hodgson, a 6-foot-7 senior forward from Mastic Beach, N.Y. who had struggled of late, put on an offensive show. He took 11 shots, including six from 3-point range and hit every one of them. He also made all three of his free throws en route to as efficient and dominating a 31-point performance can be. It was a career-best for Hodgson, whose previous high was 22 last season.

“I didn’t feel any different before the game, but when the game started and I warmed up, it felt like everything I put up would go in,” Hodgson said. “It crossed my mind [that I hadn’t missed a shot], but you try not to think about it.”

It was hard to think of anything else, since the contest was so lopsided.

“The game was over at halftime,” Mountaineer head coach Gale Catlett said. “I didn’t want to come out for the second half, but I had no choice.”

You couldn’t blame Catlett, who watched helplessly during the first 20 minutes and witnessed West Virginia (9-12, 3-8 in the Big East) fall behind 8-0 before finally scoring 6:16 into the game.

The Scarlet Knights added runs of 14-2 and 10-0 later in the first stanza, eventually building a 29-point lead before halftime. Rutgers was up 51-24 at the intermission and never allowed the Mountaineers to put a dent in that lead.

“We never quite got in the game,” Catlett said. “I was disappointed in the turnovers and none of our guys played well.”

In addition to the Hodgson’s superhuman stat line, Rutgers overwhelmed West Virginia in virtually every area. While the Scarlet Knights (15-6, 7-4) handed out 15 assists and committed only four turnovers in the first half, their opponents had just one assist and 16 turnovers.

“We were really disappointed about our loss at West Virginia,” guard Geoff Billet said of the Mountaineers’ dramatic 65-63 victory in Morgantown on Dec. 30. “We wanted to make sure we didn’t make any mistakes and we did that. And then we just fed off Rob, who was unbelievable.”

Hodgson, who netted 21 of his points during the decisive first half, was coming off two terrible performances. He scored six points in Rutgers’ 84-64 win over Lafayette last Monday and had just eight in the previous win at Notre Dame.

“We tried to lighten him up a little bit. Usually it takes a couple of guys to score 30 for us,” Rutgers head coach Kevin Bannon said of how his staff handled his star’s slump. “We clowned around with him in practice any time he made a good play. I think it worked.”

It did.

“I was more relaxed out there than I had been,” Hodgson said. “Then when I started hitting shots, I felt even better.”

And Rutgers now feels better about their position in the Big East. The win, the Scarlet Knights’ fourth in a row, moves them into fourth place in the conference. And with games at Villanova on Wednesday and Providence next Sunday, yesterday’s rout was a tremendous confidence boost.

“At the beginning of the year I said I wanted to continue moving in the right direction,” Bannon said. “Now we’ve put ourselves in a position to significantly improve on last year [when Rutgers went 14-15, 6-12]. You have to be excited about that, to be playing meaningful basketball in February.”