
Louisville, in its 81-67 win over a reeling UVA Basketball team on Saturday, had nine more shots at the rim and had four extra trips to the free-throw line.
That’s a function of Virginia having eight more turnovers, and Louisville having five more offensive rebounds.
UVA (8-10, 1-6 ACC), which has now lost five straight, bookended by losses to Louisville (14-5, 7-1 ACC), outshot the Cardinals, 47.1 percent to 43.3 percent, was 8-of-21 from three (Louisville was 6-of-23), even created a decent number of looks at the rim (11-of-15).
Virginia even shot 65.0 percent from the field in the second half.
Problem there being, 12 second-half turnovers, leading to 15 Louisville points.
You want to know why Virginia got blown out again by Louisville, that’s it, in a nutshell.
Sugarcoating
Another problem here: I listened to interim coach Ron Sanchez’s postgame press conference, and I’m not sure he watched the same game the rest of us did.
“I believe for us, if I take the first four minutes away from the second half, I’m probably gonna find a lot of positive things,” he began his remarks in the presser, the word salad eventually getting around to the four-minute second-half stretch in which Virginia outscored Louisville 16-6 to cut a 21-point deficit down to 11.
“We had a nice stretch there where we cut into the lead with Anthony Robinson, he gave us a really good lift off the bench. We found guys that had enough energy and juice in the tank to come in and compete hard,” said Sanchez, who, yes, I understand that he’s trying to find something positive in a situation that is anything but positive, but, seriously.
We’ve been on the other end of these games for a decade now, where you get a big lead, and it’s human nature, you let up a little bit when you’re up 20 on a team that you’re clearly outclassing.
First-year Louisville coach Pat Kelsey lit into his team after the Elijah Saunders three that cut the deficit to 59-48 with 8:31 to go, and his team responded with a 13-4 run over the next 3:38 that got the lead back up to 20.
The final score looked better than it should have because Andrew Rohde, Isaac McKneely and Taine Murray each made their one-and-only threes of the day in the final 3:10, basically, garbage time.
Game notes
Saunders posted a double-double with 19 points (6-of-13 FG, 3-of-6 3FG, 4-of-7 FT) and 10 rebounds in 33 minutes.
McKneely had the quietest 10-point day that you can imagine – he only shot the ball twice in the second half, with the lone made three coming at the 2:01 mark.
Blake Buchanan had nine points and five boards, somehow not getting a single rebound in the second half, though some of that was a function of him getting just eight minutes due to foul trouble and Robinson getting 14 second-half minutes.
Robinson finished with a career-high seven points (2-of-2 FG, 3-of-5 FT) and five rebounds off the bench.
The 14 minutes played was also a career-high.
The other young big, the ubertalented Jacob Cofie, had two points and a single, solitary rebound in 10 minutes, which weren’t foul-limited – he had just one foul.
Tough week for Cofie – he had four points and two boards in 18 minutes in the 54-52 loss to SMU on Wednesday.
Rohde had seven points (3-of-10 FG, 1-of-4 3FG) and four assists vs. two turnovers in 35 minutes.
Dai Dai Ames, out of the doghouse, for now, started and played 27 minutes, finishing with four points (2-of-4 FG, 0-of-1 3FG) and four assists vs. two turnovers.
Freshman Ishan Sharma, who should be starting, got 23 minutes off the bench, scoring six points (2-of-4 FG, 2-of-3 3FG).
Sharma didn’t put his first shot up until the 12:04 mark of the second half.
We need him to be greedier.
Murray, who started the Jan. 8 game at Cal, and averaged 24.4 minutes per game over a nine-game stretch from Nov. 29 through Jan. 8, got just three minutes in this one, after getting seven in the loss to SMU earlier in the week.
Critical analysis
Sanchez, 18 games into this season, needs to get set on a rotation already.
He insisted after the SMU game earlier this week that he’s not experimenting with his lineups, but he clearly is.
The indecision is preventing this team from being able to develop any cohesiveness or consistency.
I keep saying this, but I would not have believed you if you’d told me after the double-digit win over Villanova back in November that this team would be 8-10, 1-6 in the ACC, with eight double-digit losses.
That game was part of a doubleheader in Baltimore with the back end featuring a matchup between Virginia Tech and Penn State, which blew out the Hokies by 22, the first of six straight losses for Tech.
Credit to the Hokies, they’re 5-4 since, and 3-4 in the ACC, and they played Wake Forest (14-4, 6-1 ACC) tight today in what turned out to be a 72-63 loss.
To that point, Villanova, with the loss to Virginia in November, was 2-3, with its other losses at that early stage being to Columbia and St. Joseph’s, has gone 10-4 since, is 5-3 in the Big East, and on the periphery of an NCAA Tournament bid.
Mike Young and Kyle Neptune have their revamped rosters playing better; Sanchez not only has his team playing markedly worse, but his guys don’t know from one game to the next how many minutes they’ll be getting.
This 8-10 record is all on Sanchez and the rest of the interim staff, is what I’m getting at here.