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This Virginia team doesn’t appear suited to be able to play Virginia basketball

Chris Graham
tony bennett
Tony Bennett. Photo courtesy UVA Athletics.

Mover-blocker isn’t going to work with two point guards who can’t shoot. Ball screens don’t work with bigs who aren’t threats on the roll.

We’re only three games in, but Tony Bennett and his staff have their work cut out for them if they’re going to coax even a .500 season out of this group.

We had to wonder after the opening loss to Navy, which held Virginia scoreless for more than eight minutes down the stretch in a 66-58 upset in JPJ last week, but you could hope, hey, maybe this is just a good Navy team.

Not. Navy lost by double-digits at Virginia Tech and Louisville, and really weren’t in either game.

They’re the Navy team that they’re supposed to be.

We knew that Houston, at Houston, was going to be tough, on paper. Houston was a Final Four team last year.

News flash: four of Kelvin Sampson’s eight rotation guys are transfers.

His team is newer than ours is. We’ve only got three new guys – two transfers and one freshman barely getting rotation minutes.

Watching this team play three games now, it’s obvious that it’s going to struggle to score consistently using Bennett’s preferred mover-blocker scheme, which relies on guards using screens from the bigs to get separation on the perimeter, for either open looks, dribble drives, pocket passes to bigs on rolls or kickout passes out to bigs for pick-and-pops.

It works great when you’ve got guys like Joe Harris, Malcolm Brogdon, Justin Anderson, Ty Jerome, Kyle Guy and De’Andre Hunter running off the screens, and guys like Mike Scott, Anthony Gill, Mike Tobey, Mamadi Diakite, Sam Hauser, Trey Murphy III and Jay Huff setting them, then rolling to the hoop or popping to the mid-range or three-point line.

At best with this group, you’ve got Franklin to run off the screens, and Gardner to set them and then roll or pop.

Teams can game plan to sag off Reece Beekman and Kihei Clark, because at best Clark is good for a couple of threes, but otherwise, he’s a 34.8 percent career shooter from deep, while Beekman is a 25 percent shooter from three, and knows it (he averages just 1.5 attempts from behind the arc per game).

Mover-blocker is at its best when two of the three guards are threats – think, London Perrantes at the point, Harris and Brogdon on the wings; Clark at the point, Jerome and Guy on the wings – and there’s a big to keep you honest in the post and in the mid-range – Gill, Tobey, Diakite, the rest.

When you’ve got one shooter, the defense can key on that one, choke off dribble drives, clog the lane to make it hard for Gardner, essentially, make it so that two non-perimeter threat point guards and the five, either Kadin Shedrick or Francisco Caffaro, both offensive liabilities, are the ones who beat you.

Running mover-blocker is in Bennett’s DNA; his father, Dick Bennett, perfected the offense, first as a D3 coach, before moving up the ladder to Green Bay and then Wisconsin and Washington State.

That said, mover-blocker is going to be the death of this group, which is ill-suited to be able to score points consistently using it.

The offense is going to perpetually bog down if it has to go five-on-five with Beekman not a threat at all from the perimeter, with Clark only a marginal threat, with Ds able to focus on Franklin and Gardner, with Shedrick and Caffaro incapable of contributing anything positive at the five.

Play it the straight-up way, and Virginia could have a sub-.500 record not just in the ACC, but overall.

Heretical as it is to suggest, Bennett needs to give consideration to trying to run tempo, to get some easy buckets in transition with his point guards attacking the paint before opponents can set up defensively, either finding cutting bigs or perimeter shooters on the secondary break.

If there’s nothing there in transition, then, add some isos for Beekman to the mix of options. Clear his path, let him get to the rim.

All running him off screens does is put another defender in his way, a big that isn’t going to respect the ability of the big he’s laying off to do anything on the roll or the pop.

One other suggestion: more four-guard. The two points, plus Franklin and Casey McCorkle or Kody Stattmann, along with Gardner. Spread the floor, let the points and Franklin create. Give Gardner space to do stuff in the paint and facing up at the elbow.

Spacing is key with this group, not screens.

I’m not suggesting ditching the way Bennett does things forever more. The 2022 recruiting class looks to be on par with the 2016 class that brought in Guy, Jerome, Hunter and Huff, all of whom would go on to play in the NBA.

The recruiting misses since the 2019 national title – the 2019 class was built around Casey Morsell, now at NC State; the 2020 class was built around Jabri Abdur-Rahim, now at Georgia – are what made this a gap year.

The sum from the last three recruiting classes is one starter (Beekman), one role player (McCorkle), one on the fringe of the rotation (Taine Murray), and three guys (Morsell, Abdur-Rahim and Justin McKoy, now at UNC) playing elsewhere.

Two potential studs (Morsell, Abdur-Rahim) who didn’t pan out. Beekman just needs a jump shot to make his ability to get into the lane stand out. It’s disappointing that he obviously didn’t work in the offseason to develop in that way, but that is what it is.

The jury is still out on McCorkle, Murray and Shedrick.

This is where we are now.

How does Bennett approach it from here? Does he try to just run his stuff better with a group that will never run it better enough?

The first of the five pillars is humility, remember.

Story by Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham

Chris Graham, the king of "fringe media," a zero-time Virginia Sportswriter of the Year, and a member of zero Halls of Fame, is the founder and editor of Augusta Free Press. A 1994 alum of the University of Virginia, Chris is the author and co-author of seven books, including Poverty of Imagination, a memoir published in 2019. For his commentaries on news, sports and politics, go to his YouTube page, or subscribe to his Street Knowledge podcast. Email Chris at [email protected].