One lesson Ron Sanchez could take with him into next year, if he, indeed, ends up getting the UVA Basketball job on a full-time basis after the season, would be, succession planning.
Sanchez and Tony Bennett recruited the roster for this year’s squad with what both said before the season was a two-year development plan in mind, the key reason for that being, they had to, because they lost two guys to the NBA, and had to start over almost from scratch, in terms of proven guys.
Coming from where this 2024-2025 cycle started, for the most part, you’d like what you’re seeing, based on what we’ve been seeing of late, in terms of a next year’s roster.
Transfers Dai Dai Ames and Elijah Saunders look like good fits; freshman recruits Jacob Cofie and Ishan Sharma are going to be studs; redshirt freshman Anthony Robinson has been a revelation of late.
Blake Buchanan can be Jekyll or Hyde, but he’s improved from his uneven freshman season.
Andrew Rohde has become a really good college point guard.
Isaac McKneely is averaging 18.6 points per game over his last seven.
Give this roster another year together playing Tony Bennett Basketball – a year older, a year wiser, another year in the Mike Curtis physical development program – and I can see them doing some damage in the ACC.
They may not get the chance to do that, of course, because of the awful November, December and January they had to endure – blowout losses to #3 Florida, #5 Tennessee, #9 St. John’s, the disaster of a trip out west, with double-digit losses to Stanford and Cal, both the textbook definition of mid.
From there, we get to Saturday’s 73-70 win at Virginia Tech, the fifth W in the last seven games, which gets UVA over .500 for the first time in six weeks.
I hate playing the if game, but, man, if SMU doesn’t make three threes in the final 25 seconds, one in the literal final second, to win by two, if Andrew Rohde’s floater at the buzzer falls two weeks ago at home against Virginia Tech, well, OK, reality check.
All that happens, and you’re still looking at 15-10, 8-6 in the ACC, but the Virginia kids would be on the distant fringes of maybe playing their way into March Madness, instead of being where they are now, playing for their coach’s job, and to be able to make another run at it next year.
Sanchez: Gotta give them time
“Guys have to get used to each other. Time is the key in it all,” Sanchez told reporters after the win in Blacksburg on Saturday.
Yes, Virginia is playing its best basketball of the season right now, and this is the time of year that you want to be playing your best basketball.
It just might be too late, but even so.
“I could want these guys to be where they are now back in November, but you need time to do that. Those two months, doesn’t matter what I do, those three months, I cannot speed that process up, you cannot speed up Mother Nature. Some things require time and experience,” said Sanchez, saying the quiet part out loud – that it’s not easy to play the style of basketball that he knows.
Tony Bennett Basketball, a mix of the mover/blocker offense, a read-and-react system that relies on timing and touch, and the Pack Line defense, in which everything is a 180 from the way you’ve been taught to play growing up, takes time and reps to be able to play well.
It works – Virginia, in the Bennett era, won or shared in six ACC regular-season championships, the most recent coming two short years ago, in addition to two ACC Tournament titles, two other ACC Tournament finals appearances, and that 2019 national championship – but it doesn’t come easy.
This, incidentally, is a key to the argument of Bennett critics, who are now Sanchez critics, given the realities of the NIL/transfer portal era.
Stick with it, or cut bait and start over
My answer to that one: I dunno, and let me be clear, the decision on that is way, way above my pay grade.
It’s been quiet on the search front the past week or so, and I wonder how much that has to do with the obvious improvement that we’ve been seeing on the floor from this year’s group.
I can’t tell you if the search committee that has been working to identify and vet possible coaching candidates has Sanchez on the short list or not.
The sense there for a while – as of a couple of weeks back – was that the athletics department, and the money people who write the checks, had their hearts set on making a splash with the hire.
Ron Sanchez is about as opposite a splash hire as you can get, and at 13-12, and 6-8 in the ACC, in his lone season coaching at the Power 6 level, after putting up a forgettable 72-78 record at five seasons in Charlotte, the resume isn’t on a level with even the second-tier candidates on the search committee’s list.
The one advantage that he has is incumbency, and the track record from the Bennett era.
Tony Bennett Basketball, with tweaks
The mistake, which I’m attributing to Tony Bennett, that has us where we are now is the fundamental misread that Bennett made in terms of succession planning in the NIL/transfer portal era.
And to be fair, this year’s misread wasn’t the first – think back to the 2021-2022 season, when Bennett had to replace a top-heavy roster led by future NBA guys Trey Murphy, Sam Hauser and Jay Huff, and scrambled to put together a group including Jayden Gardner and Armaan Franklin that missed out on the NCAAs in its first year together.
Gardner and Franklin, in the second years of their two-year run on Grounds, would go on to be the key foundation pieces of a 25-win team that brought home a share of the ACC regular-season title a year later.
Their departures forced Bennett, going into 2023-2024, to have to go back to the portal for reinforcements, and he focused on one-year portal guys in that cycle, and he got good production out of grad seniors Jake Groves and Jordan Minor, but with those guys being one-year guys, and Ryan Dunn and Reece Beekman foregoing another year in college to head to the NBA, that left the cupboard bare heading into 2024-2025.
For those keeping score at home, then, that’s one year of bumps and bruises, and an NIT invite, ahead of an ACC title and then a First Four bid; now, it seems we’re back to the bumps and bruises, and at this stage, it would take some work for this 2024-2025 team to even get an NIT invite.
The people who write the checks to pay the bills at UVA Athletics aren’t going to want to settle for going back and forth between bust and boom and whatever last season was.
Where we are now
A game over .500, with a tough stretch coming up – #3 Duke (22-3, 14-1 ACC) on Monday, at North Carolina (15-11, 8-6 ACC), at Wake Forest (18-7, 10-4 ACC) and #23 Clemson (21-5, 13-2 ACC), ahead of finishing up with Florida State (15-10, 6-8 ACC) and at Syracuse (11-15, 5-10 ACC).
Virginia could play quality basketball in all six and still lose four or five of those games.
As I say that, though, I don’t know – I think this team has a chance to make things interesting.
They’re playing for their coach, and they’re playing for each other – it’s fair to assume that a new coach would overhaul everything, including the roster, meaning these kids would scatter to the winds.
Sanchez hinted toward the stretch run and what may be to come for this team.
“The one thing about this group is that going through adversity and hard times presses you, it presses you forward in order for you to become who you’re supposed to become,” Sanchez said. “Society today is afraid of hard times. Everybody wants a trophy, but nobody wants to pay the price to get it. You have to go through difficulties in order for you to arrive anywhere. So, we are thankful for every loss that we took, every heartbreak, every long trip, because those experiences have to be had, so that then, then you can persevere forward.”
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Chris Graham
