
UVA Basketball, ahead of the 20-point loss to Louisville two weeks ago, had seemed to have righted the ship, with three wins in its previous four games, including what looked to be a nice win over NC State.
Turns out, NC State was on its way to a four-loss-in-five stretch, Virginia hasn’t won since, and those two are among seven ACC teams with records at either 8-9 or 9-8.
No, this ain’t the ACC that the teachers used to bring the TVs on those big rolling trays into the classroom in the afternoon on ACC Tournament Friday so they didn’t miss out on anything.
This ACC plain sucks, with just one team, Duke, in the NET Top 25, though Louisville (13-5, 6-1 ACC) is 28th, as the remarkable turnaround being led by first-year coach Pat Kelsey from the two-year disaster that was Kenny Payne (4-28 in 2022-2023, 8-24 in 2023-2024) soldiers on.
OK, it’s not as remarkable when you factor in Kelsey came in and cleaned house – his eight-man rotation is seven transfers and a freshman – which is the kind of thing you do these days because you can in the NIL/transfer portal era.
That’s me foreshadowing next year for the UVA Basketball program, when whoever the next coach comes in and does the same thing.
Forecast
- KenPom: Louisville 71-57
- BartTorvik: Louisville 69-56
- EvanMiya: Louisville 73-58
- Haslametrics: Louisville 71-57
- ESPN BPI: Louisville +12.4
How these teams matched up first time out
For starters, you can tell from the 50 in the Virginia scoreline that the Cavaliers got nothing going on the offensive end.
To that end: UVA was 6-of-16 at the rim, 9-of-22 overall in the paint, and 5-of-26 from three.
Louisville bulled the ‘Hoos, grabbing 14 offensive rebounds, scoring 34 points in the paint, getting to the rim with impunity (15-of-29 FG).
The ‘Hoos actually did good jobs defensively on Louisville’s bigs, 6’11” senior Noah Waterman (two points, three rebounds in 17 minutes) and 6’11” sophomore James Scott (six points, nine rebounds).
Aboubacar Traore, a 6’5” senior averaging 4.5 points per game this season, went absolutely off – 15 points on 6-of-10 shooting, eight rebounds in 16 minutes off the bench.
White-guy sharpshooter Reyne Smith was the other troublemaker – 15 points on 5-of-10 shooting, all threes.
What Virginia needs to do to pull the upset
The Big Three, such as Virginia has a Big Three this season, all had good games in the Jan. 4 loss – Andrew Rohde had 16 points (6-of-12 FG, 2-of-5 3FG), Isaac McKneely had 13 (5-of-10 FG, 3-of-7 3FG), and Elijah Saunders had 12 (6-of-12 FG, 0-of-4 3FG).
The problem was everybody else: who had nine points on 3-of-20 shooting from the floor, 0-of-10 from three, in 103 minutes of floor time.
Obviously, it’s going to take more offensive production from a fourth guy.
Who that might be …
- Blake Buchanan had 11 points (and 15 rebounds) in the 54-52 loss to SMU on Wednesday.
- Ishan Sharma had 10 in the SMU loss, and is averaging 8.3 points in 25.0 minutes over his last three.
- Jacob Cofie had four in the SMU loss, after putting up double-digits in the losses at Cal and Stanford – he’s averaging 9.0 points in 20.7 minutes per game over his last three.
It wouldn’t hurt to have two or all three of those guys doing more on offense.
Defensively, just do what you did in the SMU game – the Mustangs averaged 84.5 points per game coming in, and got 54 by hitting three threes in the final 25 seconds.
Louisville is averaging 78.2 points per game, for those interested.