Ron Sanchez knows that his term as the interim UVA Basketball coach is over, that it is what it is.
His season, unfortunately for him, and for his team, ended the way it had played out.
The offense created tons of good looks that turned into misses in an 8-of-27 shooting first half; the defense couldn’t stop Georgia Tech’s bigs as the Yellow Jackets opened up a 13-point lead late.
And then his guys rallied, with a wild Isaac McKneely three with 25 seconds left cutting the deficit to two.
Georgia Tech closed things out at the line for the 66-60 win.
Season, over.
Era, over.
But not without a fight.
“We don’t have any quit. We have no quit inside of us,” said McKneely, who finished with 27 points on 9-of-17 shooting, 7-of-11 from three, in 25 minutes.
“We thought we had a chance to win,” McKneely said, “even when we were down 10 with a few minutes, so we were just going to keep fighting. We knew our season was on the line.”
UVA Athletics: Sanchez not being retained
It’s been widely known that the athletics director at Virginia, Carla Williams, has engaged a committee led by UVA Basketball alum and former NBA front-office executive Wally Walker to lead the search for a permanent replacement for Tony Bennett, who stepped down on Oct. 18.
The way it played out, Sanchez, who followed Bennett to Virginia when Bennett was hired away from Washington State in 2009, and was at his side for two stretches, around a five-year stint when he left to serve as the head coach at Charlotte, got the chance to audition on the job for the past five months.
The roster that he had to work with had what are now obvious holes – a lack of inside presence, exacerbated by the failure of former five-star recruit TJ Power to develop into a rotation player, and a serious shortage of guys able to make the signature Pack Line defense work toward the goal of getting stops on a consistent basis.
Sanchez and the holdover staff, also Tony Bennett acolytes, didn’t show the ability to modify the approach on defense to what they had to work with, though the offense, which struggled in games against power conference opponents in November and December, was largely able to come around as the ACC schedule played out.
Sanchez told reporters postgame that he feels he’s “10 times a better coach than I was on Oct. 18th.”
“I think that Carla and her advisors gave me the opportunity to interview every day, and my job now is done. My interview is over. Whatever they decide will be what’s best for the University of Virginia, and Ron is going to be very supportive of whatever Carla and her advisors decide,” Sanchez said.
“I love this place. I want it to be successful. No matter what happens with their decision, Virginia has my respect, my love, and I will continue to appreciate this place for all that it’s done for me throughout the years,” Sanchez said.
ICYMI
- UVA Basketball search comes down to five finalists: No, we don’t have a coach yet
- Mailbag: Readers weigh in with thoughts on the UVA Basketball coaching search
The news about Sanchez’s future became official later in the day on Wednesday.
In a press release, Williams announced that Sanchez will not be retained.
“I am grateful to Coach Sanchez for accepting this role during such a critical time for the program.” Williams said in a statement in the release. “Ron is the ultimate professional because he cares deeply about this program and this University. He is an exceptional person because he is gifted as an empathetic and caring human being. He is beloved within our department and in the UVA community. Ron and the staff provided great stability, guidance and support for the young men on the team and we are thankful for his commitment to UVA and the values that are foundational to Virginia men’s basketball.”
Tough sledding
As you process that news, let’s try to get back to the game.
When you study the box score, it doesn’t add up that Virginia was able to get the margin down to two in the final seconds.
Georgia Tech, which advances to Thursday’s ACC Tournament quarterfinal round to play top-ranked Duke, shot 45.1 percent, scored 40 points in the paint, and had a 44-26 advantage on the boards.
McKneely kept UVA close, but he could have used some help.
No one else got into double-figures in scoring, with the team’s second-leading scorer coming in, Elijah Saunders, finishing with eight points, on 2-of-11 shooting, 0-of-7 from three.
Dai Dai Ames, who had averaged 14.8 points per game over his last 10, scored four points, on 1-of-9 shooting, 0-of-4 from three.
Andrew Rohde, who had averaged 10.8 points and 6.4 assists over the last 10 games, had a quiet five points and three assists in 36 minutes.
The most telling stat: Virginia had just eight assists on its 21 made baskets.
In the 75-61 win over Georgia Tech back on Feb. 8, the Cavaliers had 21 assists on 30 made baskets; coming in, UVA ranked sixth nationally on this particular metric, getting assists on 63.6 percent of its made baskets on the season.
“They were just being really aggressive with us, trying to push our offense out towards the halfcourt, and when we’re running our offense like that, we’ve got to try to get as close to the basket as we can,” Rohde said.
I think the bigger issue was, shots just weren’t falling, which will happen.
Also what we saw happen too often with this year’s Virginia squad, it couldn’t put two halves of good defensive basketball together.
After holding Georgia Tech to 9-of-23 shooting in the first half, which ended with the score knotted at 25-25, the Yellow Jackets shot 50 percent in the second half, with eight makes at the rim or in the paint.
“I just think they started executing better,” McKneely said. “In the first half, we stunned them with our switching 1 through 5. They like to hit the short roll. We were trying to take that away early. They made adjustments down the stretch.”
Georgia Tech led by 13, at 59-46, with 2:57 to go, and the ESPN commentators, Dave O’Brien and UVA alum Cory Alexander, started into their this one’s over, let’s keep people tuned in routine, focusing on the next steps in the UVA Basketball coaching search.
The ‘Hoos had one last run left in them, fueled almost entirely by McKneely, who had a driving layup, a pair of free throws, a forced 10-second violation on defense, and a pair of threes – so, 10 points and a one-man defensive stop in a 1:48 stretch.
The 14-3 run got the deficit to 62-60, but that was as close as it would get.
“Just proud of the guys for battling, not only today, but throughout this entire season,” Sanchez said. “For them, it’s been a season of tremendous adversity at times and a lot of unknowns, and just give them all a lot of credit for their maturity, for their willingness to really fight all the way to the last buzzer.”
Going forward
I alluded, earlier, to more than the season being on the line for the team that was out there on the court in Uptown Charlotte this afternoon.
And it wasn’t just their coach they were playing for.
Assuming, and it’s a fair bet to assume this, because it’s what’s going to happen, that the coach search is going to lead to an outside candidate getting the job, guys like McKneely and Rohde will have decisions to make, if the decisions aren’t made for them, about where they play – and also go to school – next year.
This is me assuming again, but if I’m the next coach, I’m hoping I can build around McKneely, Rohde and Ames, and maybe also freshman forward Jacob Cofie, who had nine points and five rebounds in 24 minutes off the bench in Tuesday’s loss.
But that’s all up in the air.
In the here and now, it’s not just Sanchez and the staff thinking about where their next paycheck is going to come from; the kids have a semester of school to finish up, and they may need to find their next scholarship and NIL opportunity via the transfer portal as they’re trying to finish up their schoolwork.
It was too soon after the game for the players to have had time to fully process everything – the end to the season, how hard the past five months have been, what happens next.
“Yeah, Coach Sanchez said it in the locker room afterwards. He hopes that we look back and remember the season, and he hopes that we were the closest team that we’ve ever been a part of, and I think that’s true,” said McKneely, who finished his junior season averaging a career-best 14.4 points per game, on 43.9 percent shooting from the field and 42.1 percent shooting from three.
“I can speak for Rohde beside me, Coach Sanchez, everyone in that locker room, I can speak for all of us, we’re a super close-knit group, especially the teammates. We never quit, like I said, even through the tough losses, big wins, we stayed together through it all. Our record wasn’t as good as we wanted it to be, but through wins and losses, I love these guys. It was a great season. I wouldn’t want to be a part of any other team, for sure,” McKneely said.
“Yeah, looking back on it, for me, I’m just going to remember all the great moments,” said Rohde, who improved dramatically from a tough first season at UVA, finishing with averages of 9.3 points and 4.3 assists per game, shooting 43.2 percent from the field and 41.2 percent from three.
“I think this was kind of the first year in my college basketball career where every day in practice, I’m truly enjoying it, and I’m enjoying going to practice with my brothers and my coaches, and we’re out there competing and having fun and going at each other,” Rohde said.
“I’m just so blessed to be a part of this team and playing, and I’m going to look back at all the great things that happened,” Rohde said.
Rohde and McKneely, speaking here, reminded me of the postgame presser after the UMBC loss in 2018, when Bennett had Kyle Guy and Ty Jerome come out with him, after telling them that it would be the toughest thing they’ve ever done in their lives, but it would make them stronger to sit there and take on the questions.
I hope they’re back next year with the new coach, whoever that is, and that they get a chance to do what Guy and Jerome did in 2019.
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Chris Graham
