UVA basketball coach Tony Bennett talks with reporters after the second-ranked Cavs won 50-47 at Virginia Tech on Sunday.
On getting back into the game: I think how scrappy Virginia Tech was and how inspired they played, even without one of their good players Justin Bibbs, is a credit to them. Those guys battle.
I knew that, it’s a rivalry game and we talk about those things. They were aggressive and presented some match-up problems for us. I kept telling our guys, there are a lot of possessions left, and it’s going to come down to can you get a good look, get a stop. We finally, against their zone, and even their man-to-man, which they did do a good job with, you have to crack the seal a little bit and bang a couple threes just to get it going.
We were struggling, but once we hit a three around the four-minute media timeout, I said, “Just keep your composure, keep your composure. Try to get it to a two-possession game, three-possession game. There’s lots of play left.”
And they did that. It didn’t look promising and I know that. With college basketball and young guys, you just keep hanging and you never know. I think the experience of our guys helped. Being an upperclassman, being in those spots before. Whereas if you’re a first year in that spot, it can be a little daunting. We have stuff to work on and I told our guys that, but I’m proud that they did stay steady enough and made some big shots. Justin [Anderson] and Anthony [Gill]’s put-back.
Dunk after the timeout: I told Cory Alexander on TV after the game, Justin [Anderson] has been begging me for three years, when are you gonna put in a lob for me, coach? When are you gonna put in a lob? So I said, there you go, Justin. I’m glad we put it in because it was well timed. It’s a simple play, they were jamming the lane, we weren’t making shots. Even when we got to the lane we were struggling, it was the perfect pass, great screens to set it up and it was just something against a zone that we needed. We haven’t seen a ton of zone this year and they mixed it up. When we were struggling to shoot, the way that we were, that makes the zone that much more effective.
16-0 run at the beginning of the half: We were struggling to score, obviously. We only had that one field goal for that long stretch. One-of-12 at one point, I think we were. I actually went with a four guard lineup. They had hard matchups for us and they were running good stuff. So I went with Marial [Shayok] for a while and said we would switch on ball screens. I wanted to be a little more mobile and see if we could close on those shooters and still block out. They were so spread out they weren’t offensive rebounding that much but their spacing was good and obviously that was their game plan, to shoot a lot of threes. I think Marial gave us a good lift and the guys held in there enough defensively, because we had to, it wasn’t there to start, for sure.
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Chris Graham
