A lot went right for the UVA Basketball team in the 75-61 win over Georgia Tech in JPJ back on Feb. 8.
Virginia shot 49.2 percent from the floor, was 11-of-27 from three, got 34 points in the paint, with 14 makes at the rim.
And the bigs controlled the boards – Blake Buchanan had 11 rebounds; the ‘Hoos had 13 offensive boards, and limited Georgia Tech to six.
Isaac McKneely had 20 points, Dai Dai Ames 18, Andrew Rohde had 11 points and nine assists.
A 10-0 early second-half run got the lead into double-digits, and it stayed there for all but 33 seconds of the final 15:41.
ICYMI
Georgia Tech, Virginia’s opponent in the 8-9 game in the opening game of Wednesday’s ACC Tournament second round (noon ET, ESPN), had been playing well of late since that one, winning five of six, though that was mostly feeding on the teams either playing in Tuesday’s first round or the ones left out of the tournament field entirely.
That was before the surprising 69-43 loss at Wake Forest in Saturday’s regular-season finale – I call it “surprising” because Georgia Tech had been playing well, and Wake hadn’t been, having lost three of four coming into that one.
Virginia is also coming in off a surprisingly bad outing, an 84-70 loss at Syracuse on Saturday night that was never really competitive.
One of these two will win and advance to Thursday to get fed to the top seed, Duke.
I shouldn’t be so negative there; the way to look at that should be, one of these two will advance and get a shot to shock the world.
Ahem.
They get to be a team for one more day, get to stave off the exit interviews, the transfer portal silly season.
X’s and O’s
Ron Sanchez, for his part, would like another day or two with the big whistle.
His tenure as the interim head coach will come to an end if and when Virginia loses a game, and he’s not on the short list of candidates in the search for a full-time replacement.
You can say Sanchez was dealt a bad hand, and you’d be correct – but that doesn’t change things with respect to how the situation is going to play out.
But that’s for tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever.
ICYMI
In the here and now, he’s the coach, and he and his staff, whose jobs are also on the line, have to game-plan for Georgia Tech.
“At this point in the year, there aren’t many surprises,” Sanchez told reporters on a Monday Zoom call, addressing the lessons learned from the Feb. 8 game in JPJ, and the adjustments from his staff and the staff of Georgia Tech coach Damon Stoudamire, who is 30-33 in his two years at the school, after going 71-77 in a five-year run at Pacific, which competes in the West Coast Conference, from 2016-2021.
Looking back at that Feb. 8 game, there was a lot that Sanchez liked in the game tape.
“The way we shared the ball, the way we moved the ball, that was probably one of our better offensive games,” Sanchez said. “We’ve actually got a lot of actions in transition as well. I think those two things really stood out as I walked off the film again.”
Looking ahead to tomorrow, the expectation from Sanchez is, not so much that Stoudamire and his staff will look to make x’s and o’s tweaks, but rather, just focus on improving on what they do.
“You’ve already settled into, you know, how you’re going to play, offensively, defensively, you know. What are your tactics, what are your tactical things, you know, what are your adjustments, you know? There really aren’t any surprises,” Sanchez said. “I think there’s so much video now on there, really, I don’t think there any surprises anywhere, you know. You just got to be the best version of yourself, you know, and just bring a reckless abandon and a tremendous amount of energy, you know, to the game.”
Zone
I say all that, and then, we actually saw a tweak from Sanchez, rolling out of something that we brought up in a column last week, relaying how a certain UVA Basketball legend in charge of a certain search process had wondered aloud why the staff wasn’t trying zone on defense to give opponents a different look.
Sanchez, when I asked him about that on last week’s ACC Zoom call, answered to the effect that he was focused on having his guys work to get better playing the base Pack Line defense, as opposed to trying to inject different looks.
ICYMI
One tweak that we saw from Sanchez was rolled out in the Florida State game, in which he went to a 2-3 zone on one possession coming out of a timeout.
In Saturday’s loss at Syracuse, Sanchez went to a 1-3-1 zone for several possessions in the second half, with positive results.
“Yeah, something that we’ve, you know, kind of had in our back pocket for a bit, and we’ve pulled it out here and there,” Sanchez said on Monday.
Fact check: Virginia hadn’t used a 1-3-1 zone this season until Saturday night.
“I think that, I don’t know exactly how many possessions we ran, but I liked some of the rotations,” Sanchez said. “You could tell it wasn’t natural for some guys, but it’s definitely something that that’s good to have just to throw an off-ball pitch here, there. I like that. We got a few turnovers out of it, and we were also able to rest a couple guys a little bit defensively, because they weren’t chasing as much, and we didn’t have to defend as many ball screens. So, you know, it kind of has a lot of different values to it, and, you know, just a matter of when and where, and, you know, you gotta, risk, reward, risk, reward.”
If nothing else, the presence of the 1-3-1 and 2-3 zones in the game tape makes the Georgia Tech staff spend time coming up with zone beaters, just in case Sanchez rolls one or the other out coming out of a timeout.
Forecast
- KenPom: Georgia Tech 68-67
- BartTorvik: Virginia 67-66
- EvanMiya: Virginia 66-65
- Haslametrics: Virginia 67-66
- ESPN BPI: Georgia Tech +0.2
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Chris Graham
