Did you see UVA Basketball alum De’Andre Hunter throwing down on 2023 top draft pick Victor Wembanyama last night?
Hunter, a sixth-year NBA veteran, had 27 points for the Atlanta Hawks in their 133-126 OT loss to the San Antonio Spurs.
Dre, one of the stars of the 2019 national-title team at UVA, is averaging a career-best 19.8 points per game this season.
In other UVA Basketball alum news:
Trey Murphy III had 28 points for New Orleans last night in a 133-113 loss at Houston.
TM3 is averaging 18.7 points a game for the Pelicans this season.
Malcolm Brogdon had 25 points and six assists for the Washington Wizards, who snapped a losing streak with a 123-114 win over the Charlotte Hornets.
Here’s to hoping that Brogdon, who is averaging 14.9 points in 24.8 minutes per game for the Wizards, can get healthy enough to be included in a trade-deadline deal.
Ty Jerome is having a career year (10.7 ppg, 53.7% FG, 44.7% 3FG) for the 23-4 Cleveland Cavaliers.
Jay Huff, after years of trying to catch on somewhere, played so well early for Memphis that the Grizzlies gave him a four-year contract, and he’s rewarding them with 9.1 points, 2.8 rebounds and 1.2 blocks in 15.2 minutes per game.
Sam Hauser (8.6 ppg) is an NBA champ with the Boston Celtics.
We’ve got Ryan Dunn (6.0 ppg, 42.6% FG, 31.2% 3FG) getting bench minutes as a rookie in Phoenix, Reece Beekman (18.7 ppg, 7.3 assists/g), Mamadi Diakite (15.3 ppg, 8.0 rebounds/g) and Braxton Key (13.1 ppg, 7.6 rebounds/g, 3.6 assists/g) trying to play their way into the NBA from the G League.
I’m getting at something here
These are all UVA Basketball alums making a living playing basketball Stateside.
I highlight them to bring up an issue with where things stand with the current UVA Basketball roster.
Does anybody from this year’s roster get minutes, say, with the 2019 national-title team? Or the 2016 Elite Eight team?
Even the 2021 team that was top-heavy with Murphy, Huff and Hauser had Beekman and Kihei Clark (9.6 ppg, 4.8 assists/g in Japan this season, after averaging 4.4 points and 4.8 assists in the G League last year) in the backcourt would be a tough nut for this year’s guys to crack.
The leading scorer for this year’s UVA team, Isaac McKneely (12.2 ppg, 43.3% FG, 45.6% 3FG) doesn’t start on the 2021 team.
He certainly doesn’t start for the 2019 national-title team (Hunter, Jerome, Diakite, Clark, Kyle Guy).
Maybe he’s in the starting lineup for the 2016 Elite Eight team – Brogdon, London Perrantes, Anthony Gill and Isaiah Wilkins were the definites there; I can see a case being made for going with McKneely, where he is now, as a junior, over Devon Hall, who was a redshirt sophomore on the 2016 team.
But this year’s iMac might not get rotation minutes on the 2014 Sweet Sixteen team (the guards that year were Brogdon, Perrantes, Joe Harris and Justin Anderson).
Does Elijah Saunders (10.5 ppg, 5.0 rebounds/g, 42.7% FG, 40.0% 3FG) get more than Evan Nolte minutes in 2014 (the primary bigs that year were Gill, Darion Atkins and Mike Tobey) or 2016 (Gill, Wilkins and Tobey)?
The stats might suggest that he’d steal some minutes in 2019 from Jack Salt, but Tony Bennett didn’t give Salt 16.6 minutes per game that year because of his counting numbers.
Do you see where I’m going with this?
For all the thousands of words that I’ve written over the years about Bennett winning ACC championships with guys that were underrecruited, the 30,000-foot view is that he built the program on the backs of guys with NBA talent, and the issue that we’ve seen the past two or three years, as the program has started to decline, has been, we’re not seeing that NBA talent come through like we used to.
The 2019 national title should have given Bennett access to even more talent, but a combination of recruiting misses (Casey Morsell, Jabri Abdur-Rahim, Isaac Traudt) and talent-eval blunders (Igor Milicic: 11.5 ppg, 7.7 rebounds/g for #1 Tennessee; Leon Bond: 11.5 ppg, 5.2 rebounds/g, 46.5% 3FG for Northern Iowa) have Ron Sanchez trying to win games with a roster that would have trouble staying on the court at your local YMCA.
Bennett left Sanchez one guy that you can reasonably call a ball-handler, Dai Dai Ames, a sophomore transfer from Kansas State, and you saw this week what happens when the other team’s coach realizes that there’s one ball-handler, and traps the ball out of his hands.
For all the hate directed at Kihei Clark during the five years that he started for Bennett, TB had Brogdon playing alongside Perrantes, and then Clark alongside Ty Jerome, and later Clark alongside Reece Beekman, for a reason.
The other options to get the ball into the frontcourt and initiate the offense are McKneely, a shooting guard who more often than not dribbles himself into trouble, and Andrew Rohde, whose ghastly five-turnover night in the Memphis loss on Wednesday would get you glued to the bench for a while anywhere else.
The problem is, there’s really not much else.
Don’t @me about Taine Murray, who had six turnovers in the Coppin State game, or Ishan Sharma, an iMac-like shooting guard who Sanchez is trying to use at the point, which, all that’s done is take away from his effectiveness on the perimeter.
Only Ames, among the guards, can create shots for himself or his teammates; only Jacob Cofie, among the post guys, seems to have the ability to score in the paint with any regularity, and he is used primarily in the high post to reverse the ball and to set screens.
Cofie, at least, looks like a guy who could develop into an NBA talent; I fear it will be after he’s transferred out so that he can get reps in a different system that allows him to develop and showcase his game.
Final countdown
The offense, which James Naismith schemed up as he descended the ladder from nailing that first peach basket to the wall, is the issue; kids with NBA aspirations today aren’t thinking like the Brogdons, Harrises, Jeromes, et al, did a few years ago, that their games can transcend the system they play in.
I’m wondering now if that’s more at what was going on in Bennett’s mind the past couple of years when he wrestled with himself over his future in the basketball business – that he was aware that the way the game is played now, from an x’s and o’s standpoint, has passed him by – than the I don’t like the transfer portal and NIL thing that he clumsily articulated when he finally stepped down in October.
I’ll be blunt here: I’m assuming that’s the case, and I don’t think it’s fair to Sanchez that he’s going to be the fall guy here in a couple of months when this thing comes to a final end.
It feels like Bennett pulled a Coach K here – the reference being to the year that Mike Krzyzewski cited back issues as the reason he gave Pete Gaudet the interim job at Duke so that Gaudet could go 13-18 overall and 2-14 in the ACC with a bunch of schlubs.
I know that the bigger issue with Bennett was the uncertain status of the AD, Carla Williams, who appears to be on her way out at the end of the current academic sports year; and the uncertain status of her boss, UVA President Jim Ryan, who is getting heat from the Board of Visitors over politics, over an internal revolt at UVA Health, and whatever we’re going to learn when the external review of the Nov. 13, 2022, shootings is finally released.
Ideally, Bennett would have stepped down in the spring, and UVA Athletics would have been able to move in a new direction in basketball, and this season would have been Year 1 of whatever the new era is going to be.
As it is, UVA Basketball is a lame-duck program, and unfortunately for everybody involved – the kids, the coaching staff, the fans – it’s no fun to be around a lame duck.
This is why we have the NBA League Pass.
We have Dre throwing down on Wemby, for example, to keep us warm this winter.
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Chris Graham
