I agree with Scott German (“What if today’s ugly loss was about something more for Tony Bennett, Virginia?”) that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of Tony’s coaching career.
I’ve long told my UVA friends that Tony Bennett won’t be coaching at age 60. I just don’t see him wanting to spend his entire life in the gym.
That said, I don’t agree that NIL plays a role in UVA’s current problems. For the past few years, we’ve been consistently signing Top 100 players, and almost as consistently doing little with them. Some just didn’t pan out, especially Jabri Abdur-Rahim. But aside from Reece Beekman, we haven’t had a single highly recruited player fulfill their potential since “the class” that led us to the national championship.
A possible cause is that many teams appear to have figured out our defensive and offensive schemes. The pack line is giving up a lot of back door layups no matter who is playing it. And our slow down offense seldom generates good looks against even mediocre defenses.
Jim Gillespie
The offense is a clear issue, and more so, the approach.
The stats that I see have us running more than 90 percent of the offense in halfcourt, and this group just isn’t as good at that as the 2019 group that won the national title.
This group would be better (based on its athleticism) running more, trying to get more points in transition, as we saw in the wins over Syracuse (15 transition points in the 84-62 W) and North Carolina Central (25 transition points in the 77-47 W), but Bennett doesn’t seem comfortable doing that (since the NCCU game, Virginia has a total of 29 transition points, over a four-game stretch).
For a group that ranks 151st in KenPom in offensive efficiency, I’d suggest that the current approach isn’t working, may be due for changes, but I don’t get paid the big bucks to make those calls.
Defensively, it appears on the surface that not having a shot blocker at the five spot on the back end is a big issue, which would hint to issues being more about personnel than scheme.
We all saw Notre Dame score on a handful of straight-line drives to the rim, which would seem to buttress the point, but the final stats show that the Irish ended up going 8-of-17 (47.1 percent) on shots at the rim, which is a good bit below its season average (55.6 percent).
Only one of the nine misses was the result of a blocked shot – by Blake Buchanan, the 6’10” freshman who is still trying to grow into what he’s going to be at the college level.
Buchanan (2.4 blocks/40 minutes) will eventually be a good back-end guy, but that’s only going to materialize if he can upgrade his offensive game.
Bennett, who for years sacrificed offense for defense in terms of how he doled out minutes to his rotation guys, signaled last season that he’s adapting to the way the game is being played today by going with a guy at the five who can stretch defenses with perimeter shooting – going with Ben Vander Plas at the five over Kadin Shedrick, whose game on the offensive end is rolling off screens and scoring on stickbacks.
Jake Groves, this year’s starter at five, is an improvement on the offensive end relative to Vander Plas, but Groves (4.3 rebounds/40 minutes) isn’t the rebounder that Vander Plas (7.5 rebounds/40) was.
And neither is comparable to Shedrick or guys from the past like Jay Huff or Mamadi Diakite in terms of defending the rim.
Shedrick averaged 3.3 blocks/40 minutes last season; Vander Plas averaged 0.6 last season, and this season, Groves is averaging 0.3.
Funny thing here, though – as we saw with Notre Dame, opponents aren’t cleaning up at the rim the way you’d expect with no big dude on the back end swatting shots like there’s no tomorrow.
It does help having Ryan Dunn, the 6’8” guard now cast as a power forward, blocking 3.3 shots/40 minutes, but Dunn’s blocks are weaksides and chasedowns, and as spectacular as they appear on replays and highlight reels, going for shots from the side and behind does leave Virginia exposed to offensive rebounds if he doesn’t knock the shot out of the air.
Virginia opponents are shooting 50.8 percent at the rim this year, down from the 53.7 percent mark in 2022-2023, 58.8 percent mark in 2021-2022, and the best since the 2019-2020 group that had Huff and Diakite on the back end (48.8 percent).
So, to me, the defense is fine – still ranking sixth in KenPom; Notre Dame just made shots yesterday, and that happens.
The offense needs work, and this is the area of concern to me.
I can’t imagine that it would be easy to just change everything you do schematically in the middle of a season.
That kind of sea change is something you need to start installing in the spring, way ahead of even the start of practice in October.
I don’t know that we’ll see more than, just doing what they do, and doing it harder.
That’s why I’m downgrading my expectations for this year’s team. I don’t see doing the same thing that isn’t working, and just doing it harder, as leading to better results.
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Chris Graham
