This year’s Virginia team is going to be dramatically better than last year’s team, which spent half the season ranked in the Top 10, was ranked as high as #2, and shared the ACC regular-season title with Miami, which went on to the Final Four.
The 2023-2024 preseason AP Top 25 is out today. Virginia isn’t in it.
Duke, of course, is, at #2, with Miami, which lost ACC Player of the Year Isaiah Wong, is #13, and North Carolina, which didn’t even make the NCAA Tournament a year ago, and lost its leading scorer, Caleb Love, to the transfer portal, is at #19.
Is what it is.
Chris Graham on the preseason AP Top 25
The national-media narrative about the 2023-2024 Virginia team was written in the aftermath of the last-second NCAA Tournament loss to Furman, and obviously hasn’t yet been updated.
The program, going into the offseason, was already set to lose Kihei Clark, Jayden Gardner and Ben Vander Plas to exhausted eligibility; then Armaan Franklin decided to forego his last year of eligibility as a grad transfer to try to make an NBA or G-League roster, and Kadin Shedrick and Isaac Traudt shopped themselves around on the transfer portal, with Shedrick landing at Texas, and Traudt ending up at Creighton.
The narrative that emerged: Virginia was headed toward a rebuild.
Tony Bennett, yeah, he did himself OK on that.
The coach landed a pair of 17-point-per-game scorers from the portal to replace Franklin and Gardner, in 6’6” guard Andrew Rhode and 6’8” beast forward Jordan Minor, and lucked out into having Reece Beekman, who for a while last season was a projected late-first-round NBA Draft pick, return for his senior season.
Then you throw in Georgetown transfer point guard Dante Harris, a good comparison skill-set-wise to Clark; 6’9” Oklahoma transfer Jake Groves, a floor-spacer who looks to be a better BVP; and incoming freshman Elijah Gertrude, an athletic 6’4” wing – plus another athletic wing, 6’5” Leon Bond, who redshirted last season.
Dead-eye shooter Isaac McKneely returns and likely starts at the two guard spot.
And there’s another incoming four-star, Blake Buchanan, a 6’10” motor guy with touch in the midrange.
And then there’s Ryan Dunn, who averaged 2.6 points per game off the bench last season.
Dunn is now a projected mid-first-round pick in the upcoming NBA Draft.
He’s basically played his way up from being a four-star as a prep in one year of playing 12 minutes a game.
That’s the top 10 guys competing for rotation spots, not counting incoming three-star recruit Anthony Robinson, a rugged 6’10” big who has earned some nice reviews for his play in preseason practice; hyper-athletic 6’4” walk-on Desmond Roberts; and junior Taine Murray, a 6’5” wing who, you might not remember, had played his way into rotation minutes toward the end of the 2022-2023 season.
This might be the deepest team that Bennett has had at Virginia. It will certainly be the most athletic he’s had since the 2019 national-title team, and will be markedly better on defense than it’s been the past couple of years, and should be better as well on offense, both with perimeter shooting and scoring in the paint and in the post.
Writers who only remember the loss to Furman and the exodus afterward wouldn’t know that, but, that is what it is.
This team will win the ACC again when it’s all said and done.
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