Armaan Franklin felt like he let his teammates and coaches down in #25 Virginia’s 66-58 loss to Navy in the season opener on Tuesday.
Their confidence in him after his 2-for-11 shooting night was a boost.
“I got a lot of text from guys that night, just telling me that they believe in me, they know what I can do, and just to keep shooting. So, for this to happen tonight, I made a couple of shots, it just speaks to everybody’s confidence in me, and I just felt like I played well with their confidence,” Franklin said after a nice rebound performance in UVA’s 73-52 win over Radford.
Franklin scored a game-high 21 points on 7-of-12 shooting, 5-of-8 from three, in 30 minutes.
He admitted afterward that he took the loss to Navy “really hard” because he didn’t feel like he had played up to his standard.
Franklin, an Indiana transfer, had averaged 11.4 points per game as a sophomore at IU last season, shooting 42.4 percent from three-point range.
He didn’t make his first three Tuesday night until the game had already been decided, with 14.7 seconds left, after missing his first six attempts from long-range.
Radford coach Darris Nichols didn’t expect Franklin’s shooting woes to continue.
“When I was at the University of Florida last year, we tried to recruit him, so we all know what he can do,” Nichols said. “You don’t want to define anybody by one game. We saw what he was doing at Indiana. We knew he was capable of having a big game even though the Navy game he didn’t play so well. He was a focal point. Obviously, he played really well ,so I guess he locked in and responded.”
Thirteen first-half points from Franklin helped UVA to a 41-21 lead at the break. He made five of his first six shots from three-point range as the ‘Hoos led by as many as 24.
“I expected him to come back from that,” said sophomore guard Carson McCorkle, who had five points on 2-of-6 shooting in 17 minutes off the bench Friday night. “I hadn’t seen him shoot that bad since I’ve known him, since he’s been here. Every shot he took tonight looked good, looked like it was going in. That’s the Armaan we know, so I didn’t expect anything less.”
There’s still a lot of work for this team, a lot of improvements to be made, but one key for Virginia since Franklin committed was getting him minutes, and getting him contributing from the perimeter.
The Franklin that we saw on Friday night is the Franklin that we will need to see frequently if this Cavaliers team is going to have any kind of season.
“That’s what I came here for. I wanted to be thrown into the fire,” Franklin said. “I think I’m adjusting pretty well to it. There’s some things that I can definitely improve on defensively and offensively, more sureness, things like that, but I think I’m adjusting well. You know, the guys around me who’ve been here, I look to them a lot for advice on things, and they have helped me out a lot.”
Story by Chris Graham
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