
That UVA Basketball team that we saw tonight, victorious at Pitt, 73-57, reminded me of a story that I’ve told a million times about Anthony Gill, now an old guy in the NBA.
Gill told me back during his redshirt sophomore season at Virginia, his first, after a year at South Carolina and a redshirt year after transferring, back when you still had to do that, about how hard it is to pick up the Pack Line D, and how Tony Bennett had told him to focus on what he needed to do on defense until it became second nature, and once that happened, everything – the Pack Line and the mover/blocker – would make sense, and he wouldn’t be thinking anymore, and able to play freely.
This is just one game, but, man, that looked like a team that had been playing Tony Bennett Basketball for years.
Maybe it’s finally all coming together?
(It’s just one game. I’m forever an optimist.)
Pitt (14-8, 5-6 ACC) came in as an NCAA Tournament bubble team, in bad need of not laying an egg in what would be a Quad 3 game against an under-.500 UVA team that was 3-8 in the ACC coming in.
That might be generous – the Panthers have now lost six of their last eight, and they have just one Quad 1 win.
Even so, you didn’t figure going into Big Monday that a Virginia team coming off a dispiriting one-point home loss to a bad Virginia Tech team 48 hours ago would put up much of a fight.
It was Pitt, as it turns out, that had no fight – a 17-0 UVA run got the lead into double-digits at the 10:20 mark of the first half, and it never got closer than 11 the rest of the way.
It was 34-19 ‘Hoos at the half, and it wouldn’t get closer than 14 in the final 20 minutes.
Game Notes
Dai Dai Ames had 27 points (11-of-16 FG, 3-of-6 3FG, 2-of-2 FT), obviously a career-high.
For context, Ames had scored a total of 55 points over a 13-game stretch between the Dec. 4 loss at Florida and the Jan. 29 win at Miami – so, that’s 4.2 points per game, on 34.1 percent shooting, for two calendar months.
In February, Ames has tonight’s 27-point game, and the 11 (on 5-of-8 shooting) in the loss to Virginia Tech on Saturday.
Also notable: Blake Buchanan had a double-double, 10 points (4-of-7 FG, 2-of-4 FT) and 11 rebounds.
Buchanan had the nice 16-point, nine-rebound game in the win at Miami last week.
In between, he only got 15 minutes, because of foul trouble, with four points and four boards in the loss to Tech.
Solid game from Andrew Rohde: nine points (3-of-6 FG, 3-of-5 3FG), nine assists vs. zero turnovers, seven rebounds.
Can we cut it with the comments about how Rohde can’t play point guard at this level already?
Solid effort also from redshirt freshman center Anthony Robinson: nine points (3-of-4 FG, 3-of-5 FT) and six rebounds in 17 minutes off the bench.
Inside the Numbers
The game was played at Virginia’s pace (56 possessions for Virginia, 58 for Pitt).
Virginia owned the boards: 33-21 overall, with an 86.2 percent defensive-rebound rate, and a 32.0 percent offensive-rebound rate.
Pitt only had five assists on its 18 made baskets.
Virginia had 10 makes from three (10-of-22, 45.5 percent) and 10 makes at the rim (10-of-15, 66.7 percent).