Virginia has had maybe the most disconnected 22-9 regular season of any college basketball program ever.
The 22 wins include Clemson (21-10, NET: 27), Florida (21-10, NET: 35), Wake Forest (19-12, NET: 37), Texas A&M (18-13, NET: 46).
OK, that’s it, in terms of the impressive wins.
UVA has eight wins over Quad 1 and Quad 2 teams.
It’s the nine losses.
Whoa.
They’ve come by an average of 20.4 points per beatdown.
All nine have been by double-digits.
And in five of the losses, Virginia didn’t get out of the 40s in scoring.
It says a lot about Tony Bennett’s program that they’ve been able to wrangle 22 wins out of a group that, when it is just the slightest bit off, isn’t even competitive.
“That’s kind of been a story of this team. We’ve gotten knocked down pretty hard about six or seven times. A lot of teams, they just kind of, don’t get back up. But I appreciate how these guys got back up and stayed together and just, you get humbled, you eat your humble pie, and then you come back and fight and live with the results. And that’s what these guys have done,” Bennett told reporters after his team’s 72-57 win over Georgia Tech on Saturday night.
The win put this team with a mighty fine margin of error at 13 wins in the ACC, translating to a third-place league finish.
It’s basically a makeshift roster that Bennett has had to work with, with only one starter from last year’s ACC regular-season co-champs, point guard Reece Beekman, back for 2023-2024.
Only two other rotation players from last year’s team, sophomores Isaac McKneely and Ryan Dunn, returned.
The rest of the rotation is a mix of transfers and holdovers who have had to step up into bigger roles.
Which is probably why we’re through four full months of the season, and now into the fifth, which is postseason time, and it’s clear that Bennett is still trying to figure out how to use his roster to win games.
In last night’s win, he went with little-used junior guard Taine Murray, and was rewarded with Murray putting up 12 points on 5-of-10 shooting in a career-high 28 minutes.
Murray’s minutes came at the expense of off-guard Andrew Rohde, a 17.1-point-per-game scorer last season at St. Thomas, whose game just has not translated from the Summit League to the ACC.
Rohde didn’t get into the game on Saturday night, after starting 27 of the season’s previous 30 games.
“I think the way Taine was one more shooter and spacer and mover on the floor, obviously Reece was getting open, we got some stuff,” Bennett said, by way of analysis. “We didn’t score a ton, I don’t know points in the paint, we had 26, and we don’t always throw it inside and score around the rim, so it is important for us to get different kinds of looks and as many rhythm shots as we can. And some teams, you know, they’ll guard you differently, but I thought our guys were pretty persistent at moving the ball. We had a couple little wrinkles with the bye week. I thought that helped us, too.”
The tweaks were, more Murray and Jake Groves, another floor spacer at the five-spot who had nine points (3-of-7 3FG) and six rebounds, who helped open the middle of the floor for Beekman (21 points, nine assists) and took the extra defensive help off McKneely (16 points, 4-of-8 3FG).
The “wrinkles” that Bennett referenced and then talked past included more offensive sets with Beekman in high screens and more middle screens to free up shooters in the lane.
The win over Georgia Tech, which had come in on a three-game winning streak, and with four wins in its last five, was key for UVA’s NCAA Tournament resume just in being a win, one, and then, two, also in the context of providing some badly-needed style points for a team that was having trouble putting points of the board, and thus was not looking good through the lens of the subjective eye test.
It wouldn’t hurt, in terms of that NCAA Tournament resume thing, for Virginia to get a win or two next week in the ACC Tournament, and to also look good in doing so.
(Which is to say, you know, not winning a game 49-47.)
Bennett’s message to his team: “use this momentum.”
“We know we’ve got areas to keep tightening the bolts, but prepare as well as you can, and you get into that,” Bennett said. “And again, single-elimination, I don’t even know what that means, who do we play the, whatever game it is. There’s such, you know, a congestion in our league, and everyone’s capable, and you have to be ready. And we’ve learned that hard way many times. But it’s good to be in this spot and play meaningful games at this point in the season.”
One other message that Bennett shared with his team postgame might be a good one to share with the fan base.
“I told them after the game, I said, the bones are good in this program, the foundation’s good. I said, it’s good because of the character of the young men,” Bennett said. “And again, you’ve heard me use this quote often, you better have a group of guys you can lose with or go through adversity with if you’re going to be successful, and we’ve had our, you know, our fair share of that, and they’ve stayed together that way. So, again, we’ve won 13 games in this league, we’ve won 22 games, we finished in third place, and yep, we’ve gotten blown out, but we’ve won, and we haven’t had any, we’ve had some big losses, but not any bad losses in terms of nonconference and, and so I think that is a real good job with a team that’s pretty inexperienced.”
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Chris Graham
