The more you watch this UVA Basketball team, the more it becomes clear – Tony Bennett wasn’t sure he was coming back, decided at some point a few weeks into the offseason that, sure, I’ll do it, I’ll come back, got what he could get from the transfer portal weeks after everybody else had gone over the offerings a few times so that he could piece together a roster, and just assumed, we’ll get it together, we always do.
That’s why there isn’t a defensive identity with this team, why the post play is shockingly bad – well, the big man coach having checked out is a factor there, too.
The backcourt is plus, but if you can’t get any productivity from your bigs, if you can’t get stops, can’t get rebounds, you’re going to need to be able to win a track meet – and when your coaching staff is all Tony Bennett clones, they’re not equipped to coach a team that can win track meets.
This was evident in how Saturday’s 71-58 loss to #13 Clemson went down on Saturday.
Game story
Clemson (24-5, 16-2 ACC) is clearly good, borderline but not quite elite – this year – but this one was ripe for the picking.
Virginia went up 10 early in the second half, but it felt like fool’s gold even up 10 – Clemson had been getting what it wanted on offense, attacking the paint, attacking the rim.
Clemson coach Brad Brownell made a slight adjustment with his coverages, having his guards overplay ballhandlers and cutters, and Virginia went into the tank for the next six and a half minutes, scoring a lone bucket as the Tigers went on a 20-2 scoring streak that turned the flow of the game in a different direction, for good.
“I give Clemson some credit, man. I feel like we missed some stuff at the rim. I feel like we left, we left a couple of points at the rim that we could have finished,” interim UVA coach Ron Sanchez told reporters after the loss.
“They are really good defensively. They made it hard,” Sanchez said. “They put pressure on the ball. We need a little more ballhandling. We didn’t score in the paint. We didn’t get any really production from in there, from the post play. We leaned on jump shots, and sometimes when your shot isn’t dropping, you got to find a different way to score and, yeah, but overall, I give Clemson credit for the defensive effort.”
How about the lack of adjustment from Sanchez and his staff on the defensive end? That was glaring, because the Tigers pierced the Pack Line early, and the ‘Hoos never did figure out how to stop Clemson from getting to its spots.
Clemson finished with 48 points in the paint, getting 17 makes on 27 attempts at the rim, and using that pressure on the Virginia D to get to the foul line for 23 charity tosses, adding another 18 points that way.
Clemson, to get its 71 points, had one make from three and one make from the midrange.
Ian Schieffelin had 21 points (8-of-11 FG, 5-of-5 FT) and 13 rebounds. Viktor Lakhin, a seven-footer with great footwork in the post, had 14 points (5-of-11 FG, 4-of-6 FT), eight rebounds and five assists.
Jaeden Zackery (12 points, 5-of-10 FG, 1-of-2 3FG, 1-of-2 FT) got into the paint for layups on three of his five makes, with a fourth make on a short jumper in the lane, and the team’s lone make from three.
The play-by-play of the 20-2 second-half run, from the 17:34 mark to the 11:08 mark, in which Clemson was 9-of-12 from the field, tells the story:
- layup, missed midrange, layup, dunk, layup, layup, missed layup, make on a short midrange, paint jumper, missed layup, three, paint jumper
Looking back, and looking ahead
My AFP colleague, Scott German, chatted after the game with one of the members of the coaching search committee, to get a basketball lifer’s read on what we all saw out there.
The committee member’s first observation: why not try a 2-3 zone to see if you can get Clemson out of the paint?
He then answered his own question, observing that he is a regular at practice, “and we don’t practice zone.”
It’s one thing to know where to stand in a zone, and another thing to know what to do, is the point there.
On the positive side vis-à-vis the guy in charge, our committeeman observed that Bennett hadn’t left Sanchez in a good situation, which is patently obvious at this point.
Whoever the coach is next season – paging Shaka Smart – it’s not exactly a top-to-bottom roster overhaul.
You can build around Isaac McKneely (16 points, 5-of-13 FG, 4-of-9 3FG, 2-of-2 FT), Andrew Rohde (12 points, 5-of-9 FG, 1-of-2 3FG, 1-of-2 FT, five assists) and Dai Dai Ames (12 points, 5-of-10 FG, 2-of-3 3FG), with Elijah Gertrude set to return from injury, and top point guard recruit Chance Mallory still sitting out there waiting to see who we’re going to hire to replace Bennett.
You do start over in the post, maybe top to bottom.
The stunning lack of development of Blake Buchanan, the sophomore and former four-star, who had another quiet, to the point of almost not being there, afternoon (four points, two rebounds in 19 minutes), and Jacob Cofie, a freshman four-star who put up his second goose egg in his last four games (zero points, 0-of-4 FG, 0-of-2 FT, five rebounds in 16 minutes) is an indictment on this coaching staff.
Elijah Saunders, meanwhile, doesn’t play at all like a 6’8”, 240-pound guy, floating around the perimeter on offense, providing almost no resistance on D.
Saunders had a quiet nine points and six boards in Saturday’s loss.
Since returning from a lower-leg injury that caused him to miss three games the middle of the conference slate, he’s averaged 6.1 points and 4.3 rebounds in 20.7 minutes per game, shooting 27.0 percent (10-of-37) from the floor and 29.2 percent (7-of-24) from three.
And as much as we all love the effort of Anthony Robinson, the 6’11” redshirt freshman doesn’t have the footwork to be a consistent contributor on the defensive end on pick-and-rolls, which means, you can’t throw him out there against bigs with the skill level of an Ian Shieffelin, because the opposing coach will pick-and-roll him to death, which is what we saw when Robinson was out there on Saturday.
“Ian Schieffelin has been doing this for four years in this league. It’s not, you know, it’s not, a first-year guy isn’t going to go ahead and stop him from doing that. He’s done that against some of the best bigs in this conference,” Sanchez said.
“As far as us, we just got to continue to improve, continue to teach, to get better in that area. We got to get more of a defensive presence, absolutely, from my big guys on the inside,” Sanchez said.
“It’s experience. We’re not, we don’t have older guys in there trying to get the job done,” Sanchez told reporters after the loss, for what feels like the thousandth time – seriously, it is what it is, but he could stop complaining about the team that he and Bennett recruited and decided in the spring to run with being too young.
Where we started
Was it a given that this team was going to be under .500 going into the final week of the regular season?
I mean, the Memphis game felt winnable, SMU made three threes in the final 25 seconds in JPJ to win by two, the Virginia Tech game in JPJ, a one-point loss, with a Rohde miss rolling off the rim at the buzzer, was another missed opportunity.
Then you factor in the disastrous trip to the West Coast (double-digit losses to Stanford and Cal), and the 15-point blowout loss at home to an awful Notre Dame.
I’ll give you the four losses to Top 10 teams (Tennessee, St. John’s, Florida, Duke) by 18 or more; give me four or five of those other six, you’re talking 18-11 or 19-10 going into the final week, and a chance.
If TB is still here, I think that’s where we are.
But he’s not here, and he’s not coming back.
And maybe that’s not the worst thing.
Tony Bennett Basketball doesn’t seem to mesh with NIL/portal era basketball, which dates to the spring ahead of the start of the 2021-2022 season.
Virginia, in the NIL/transfer portal era, has gone 21-14 (NIT), 25-8 (first-round NCAA Tournament upset loss), 23-11 (First Four loss), and this year is going to be somewhere between 14-18 and 16-16 (ending before the ACC Tournament gets to Thursday).
Do we really want six more years of this?
Share
Chris Graham
