Iowa State has faced a challenge over the last few weeks as injuries to several key players have piled up.

Saturday at 5 p.m., when Iowa State (13-14, 4-11 Big 12) plays at West Virginia (20-8, 9-6 Big 12), the Cyclones will be facing their biggest challenge with injuries all season.

Coach Steve Prohm will have six, maybe seven, players at his disposal against the No. 21 Mountaineers.

Senior guard Donovan Jackson, who had 27 points in the loss to TCU on Wednesday, will be in Milwaukee for his father’s funeral and will not play in Saturday’s game.

Additionally, sophomore forward Solomon Young and redshirt junior guard Nick Weiler-Babb will likely miss the rest of the season with injuries.

“There’s been back issues,” Weiler-Babb said. “To keep it simple it’s mostly back spasms. That’s about it, just knee pain and back spasms.”

Weiler-Babb went home to Dallas last weekend to get a second opinion on his knee, which has been bothering him since last summer. He has dealt with pain in his knee since then, and recently the back pain has been affecting him as well.

Weiler-Babb and Prohm both said surgery is not an option in the offseason, which falls in line with what trainer Vic Miller said earlier this season.

Along with the absences of Weiler-Babb, Jackson and Young, senior forward Hans Brase is questionable for Saturday. Brase has played in 17 of Iowa State’s 27 games this season, but he has missed the last five games. Brase played just two minutes in Iowa State’s 93-77 win over West Virginia on Jan. 31.

“It’s life, it’s reality,” said freshman guard Lindell Wigginton. “We gotta do what we gotta do even if we have [a limited number of] players. We still gotta go out there and perform.”

If Brase can’t go, the Cyclones will be down to six players. Against a pressing team like West Virginia, that could cause some issues. While the Cyclones did defeat West Virginia in the first matchup between the two teams, 39 of Iowa State’s 93 points (42 percent) came from Jackson and Young, who won’t be available this time around.

That means more minutes for guys like Terrence Lewis and Jakolby Long. Lewis and Long have typically been the eighth or ninth in the rotation for much of this season, playing spot minutes but not latching onto a role in the regular rotation.

“I thought Terrence did some good things for us [against TCU],” Prohm said. “The one shot, they got it to him late to where he was open and he forced one. But he had two good shots and he knocked those down. Defensively, he wasn’t totally out of position — at times I thought he did some good things.”

Prohm also noted that Lewis had a strong plus/minus, which measures how the score changes when a player is on the floor. Lewis had a team-high +10, making him the only player for the Cyclones who was a net-positive.

“Plus-minus, sometimes you look at that too much or don’t look at that enough,” Prohm said. “That’s a lot of factors with that sometimes, but I thought he did some good things.”

For Long, the key is defense. Long has been matched up with some of the best scorers in the country, doing an effective job in limited time against Oklahoma freshman sensation Trae Young.

If Iowa State wants to win with a limited rotation on Saturday, Long and Lewis may be the keys to that success.

“They stepped up,” Wigginton said about Long and Lewis. “They’re making shots for us. Playing on the defensive end there’s still errors, but they’re young, I’m young, so we’ve still got time to learn.”