A UVA Basketball legend who has forgotten more basketball than we’ll ever know asked my AFP colleague, Scott German, after the 71-58 loss to Clemson on Saturday, in which Clemson scored 48 points in the paint, why don’t we try a 2-3 zone?
I passed that question on to the interim coach, Ron Sanchez, on his Monday Zoom call with the ACC media.
“Is a bad zone better than a poor man? I mean, that’s a decision we have to make,” Sanchez said.
That’s certainly one way to look at it.
Sanchez actually went to a zone look for two possessions in Virginia’s 75-74 loss to Virginia Tech back on Feb. 1.
And it worked, in the brief time it was used – the Hokies didn’t score on either of those possessions, and even after Sanchez went back to the Pack Line, the ever-so-slight interruption to the flow helped Virginia climb back into the game, nearly erasing a late 13-point deficit to have a chance to win in the final seconds.
The suggestion from the legend – not naming him, because he offered his insight on background, to be helpful, not critical of the current staff – makes sense to me because of the obvious limitations with this year’s roster.
Tony Bennett, back when he was still the head coach, back in the spring, and Sanchez threw together the bulk of the rotation in May, after last year’s defensive stoppers, Reece Beekman and Ryan Dunn, decided to enter the NBA Draft, and after the program learned that the projected starting point guard, Elijah Gertrude, was going to be lost for the 2024-2025 season due to injuries suffered in an April scooter accident.
The rotation that Sanchez has been left to play with desperately misses the athleticism that we had with Beekman, Dunn and Gertrude.
The guards – Dai Dai Ames, Isaac McKneely, Taine Murray, Andrew Rohde, Ishan Sharma – are good team defenders, which is my nice way of saying, not reliable one-on-one defenders; the forwards – Blake Buchanan, Jacob Cofie, Anthony Robinson, Elijah Saunders – are, I guess I need to go with good team defenders here again, to try to be nice.
There’s no shutdown guy, no disruptors, no rim protection.
Clemson exploited the bejeebies out of that on Saturday, making 17 shots at the rim, another seven in the paint, and scoring 18 points at the line – that was 66 of their 71; Clemson had one midrange jumper and one three, total.
The game plan from coach Brad Brownell got Virginia’s bigs into pick-and-rolls that caught our guys being too slow to recover, and spread the floor to give the guards and the bigs room to operate one-on-one in the paint.
The reason you hear from a basketball legend about trying a 2-3 zone against what we saw on Saturday is, at least you try to take away what was working for Clemson, and make them find something else.
Sanchez’s reply to that: “We have some really good coaches into this league, and there’s not much that you can do that they haven’t seen or not gonna be prepared for. You know, you run a 2-3 zone, most of us know what we’re gonna do against that,” Sanchez said.
Now, I’m neither an interim ACC head coach or a basketball legend, but it seems to stand to reason to me, a small-town bird lawyer, your guys aren’t playing the base defense well enough to stop the other team, and this has been a feature, not a bug, all season long, maybe you craft something on the fly that can put guys in position to be able to win games, even if it isn’t the way you want to do it.
If the issues are, you don’t have great one-on-one defenders on the perimeter, your bigs don’t have the footspeed and footwork to be effective defending pick-and-rolls and postups, you don’t have a rim protector, maybe you try zone for more than two possessions, if nothing else, to give the other guys a different look.
Sanchez, to his credit – or his detriment, considering the interim tag – is dancin’ with the one that brung him.
“In the end, honestly, I’m really focusing on, we want to win games, but I’m also going to continue to focus on the development of these guys, you know, just make sure that they continue to improve, and there have been improvements,” Sanchez said. “I mean, I’m big into numbers, and, you know, we’ve done some different things, you know, and some of the things that you see are the results of some of those decisions. And some of those decisions have resulted to some success, you know. I mean, if you go from our game at Miami to Pitt to Georgia Tech, they haven’t been perfect, but you know, we have done a few different things, and we’ve, you know, had some success in some and haven’t had success in others. But in the end, it’s all about, you know, kind of what you’re trying to accomplish.”
ICYMI
- This UVA Basketball team was never going to be ready for prime time
- Scott German: UVA Basketball was ‘white meat’ for rugged Clemson
This is where Sanchez loses me.
He says he’s big into numbers; turns out, I am, too.
The Pitt (0.966 points per possession) and Georgia Tech (1.033 PPP) that Sanchez mentioned are the outliers over the past month and a half.
Over UVA’s last five, the D has surrendered 1.193 points per possession; in conference play overall, the figure is 1.144 points per possession, ranking 17th in the 18-team ACC.
We’re talking, literally, a couple of games here and there of good defense, against a backdrop of consistently bad.
Sanchez seems to be coaching for the future – and I don’t know why I say seems to be; he outright said it – when his own future at UVA is far from guaranteed.
“You gotta, you know, in the end, it comes down to you just being fundamentally sound and trying to the best that you can with what you have,” Sanchez told me today. “So, at this point, man, we’re going to keep sticking to what we do, and, you know, again, try to go down a little deeper.”
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Chris Graham
