UVA Basketball had a lot to work on, pretty much everything, after the back-to-back 20-plus-point losses last week in the Bahamas.
“We wanted to do a much better job of rebounding, taking care of the basketball, and our transition defense. Those are probably our three most direct areas of focus the last two days,” coach Ron Sanchez told reporters, after his team’s 74-65 win over a not good Manhattan team on Tuesday in a half-full JPJ.
Let’s look at the report card
Rebounding: Manhattan had better offensive and defensive rebounding percentages.
The Jaspers (3-3) are below average in both nationally, per KenPom.com.
Grade here: C-.
Taking care of the basketball: Virginia had eight turnovers in 59 possessions, after having 18 in the 64-42 loss to Tennessee, and 16 in the 80-55 loss to St. John’s.
Last season, UVA averaged 8.1 per game, best in the nation.
Grade: A-.
Transition defense: Manhattan had five fast-break points.
St. John’s had 11, and a run of alley-oop dunks.
Grade: B.
A lot of the issue for this Virginia team: age and experience
KenPom ranks the UVA rotation 233rd nationally (out of 364 D1 teams) and 15th in the ACC (out of 18 ACC teams) in age and experience.
“We’re not the most experienced, age-wise, and experienced as far as having a large number of games together. So, we are learning each other,” said Sanchez, whose tighter eight-man rotation for Tuesday’s game had one freshman, Jacob Cofie, three sophomores, Dai Dai Ames, Blake Buchanan and TJ Power, three juniors, Isaac McKneely, Andrew Rohde and Elijah Saunders, and one senior, Taine Murray.
Of that group, four of the guys are newcomers this season – Cofie, the frosh, and Ames, Power and Saunders, all transfers.
Adding to that, the coach, Sanchez, while not new to the program, is new to being a head coach.
And they’re all doing new things, trying to break away from the stagnant base offense of the past few seasons to get some new actions into the mix.
It’s a work in progress, or at least, we’re wanting to see progress.
We did see progress on the offensive end on Tuesday. The 74 points scored was a season-high, as were the 11 makes on 18 attempts at the rim – for a team that had come into the game averaging a D1-low 12.0 attempts at the rim on the season.
“In the Bahamas, I think we were a little stagnant on offense and just relying on our three-point shooting,” said McKneely, who finished with a game-high 18 points, on 5-of-10 shooting from the field and 3-of-4 from three.
“You know, like, I guess we all know we shoot the ball really well, but when we don’t shoot the ball well, that’s going to hurt us. So, like you said, Coach Sanchez had an emphasis for us tonight to get the ball in the paint,” McKneely said.
The guards touched the paint more, but still, just too many, way too many, midrange jumpers – 22, and even with the 12 makes in the midrange, you want more drives and finishes at the rim, and more shots and makes from three (UVA was 6-of-14 from three in this one).
Grading the defense
The defense, we have to grade a C-, and that’s probably being generous.
Manhattan shot 43.4 percent, was 11-of-26 from three, and got to the rim a decent amount for a smallish team (8-of-14 on shots at the rim).
“The guys that are on the floor, I do believe that they have a grasp of it now,” Sanchez said, talking defense. “Understanding it and executing it at a really high level are two different things. But that’s definitely the first step in wanting to be really good defensively. You could see it down the stretch. We had a couple breakdowns that would have been costly against another opponent.”
McKneely backed his coach up there.
“I mean, I think at times it’s really good, and then there’s times where it kind of lapses, especially when you play a team like that,” McKneely said. “They had a four man, number 13 (Fraser Roxburgh), who was, you know, picking and popping, and he was really hurting us with that.”
Roxburgh, in 17 minutes off the bench, was 3-of-7 from three, and finished with nine points.
“You know, just try to look at the film and get back at it and practice tomorrow, and just continue to, you know, you put the screws together,” McKneely said. “You know, we got a young team, you know, we got a lot of guys new to the system, and it’s early in the season, so, you know, I’m hoping by, you know, January, February, we’ll have it figured out.”
Bottom line
As I wrote above, this team is a work in progress, and we’re going to need to see a lot more progress.
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Chris Graham
