If you’d have told UVA Basketball coach Ron Sanchez before the game that Louisville would only shoot 19 threes on Saturday, he would have almost certainly been thinking, well, that one probably went well.
Louisville, coming into Saturday, was a team that chucked up a lot of threes – 52.9 percent of the Cardinals’ shots from the field were threes.
Didn’t necessarily shoot them well – 29.5 percent.
Not a lot of points in the paint.
Good, not great, on the boards.
Good, not great, on defense.
Basically, if they shoot the three well, they win, if not, well.
They didn’t shoot the three well, or a lot, on Saturday – the Cardinals were 7-of-19 from behind the arc.
For reference: they shot 39 in a loss to Tennessee, 34 in a win over UTEP, 32 in a loss to Oklahoma, 31 in a loss to Duke, made 15 (on 29 attempts) in their win over FSU.
How they manhandled Virginia on Saturday: bully ball.
A Louisville team that was averaging 14.6 shot attempts at the rim per game had 29 on Saturday.
The Cardinals made 15, badgered Virginia into 6-of-16 shooting at the rim – do the math: that’s an 18-point difference in a 20-point, 70-50 Louisville win.
ICYMI
“They came into the environment, and they owned it, you know, they competed hard. They got what they wanted,” said Ron Sanchez, the interim – emphasis on interim – head coach at Virginia, whose team seemed less aware of where it was supposed to be coming off the screens in the mover/blocker offense than the Louisville kids were.
Credit there to Pat Kelsey, the first-year Louisville coach, and his staff on that.
It can be hard to put a group of guys new to the ACC, new to each other – Kelsey’s eight-man rotation is seven transfers and a true freshman – through a game with Virginia, with the mover/blocker offense requiring discipline with the constant motion and screening.
It’s even harder on the offensive end going against Virginia’s Pack Line, which plays everything the opposite way that you’re used to, funneling the ball to the pack, taking away gaps, making you settle too often for contested end-of-shot-clock threes.
“What’s the saying, ignorance is bliss?” Kelsey said, underplaying the masterful job of the staff and his rotation guys to not only adjust, but actually outplay Virginia in a game played the way Virginia wants a game played (tempo: 59 possessions, 10 fewer than the average per game for Louisville).
Kelsey’s group is all new guys, but they’re also older guys – six of the eight guys who got rotation minutes on Saturday are fourth-, fifth- or sixth-year seniors.
That’s going to be an issue for Sanchez the rest of the way. Taine Murray is his only rotation-guy senior, and 75 of the 200 rotation minutes tonight went to freshmen or sophomores.
That’s how it can be that opponents know as well as the UVA kids where they’re supposed to be when they’re coming off screens or defending a pick-and-roll.
Tony Bennett’s best teams were ones that got a ton of minutes from juniors and seniors with three or four years of experience in the program and playing with each other.
Sanchez has a lot of talent on this year’s roster, but it’s still a mix of freshmen, transfers and a couple of vets without a significant number of reps together in mover/blocker and the Pack Line.
Which is why too many offensive possessions featured either Murray, Andrew Rohde or Isaac McKneely dribbling the ball at the top of the key extended, waiting too long for somebody to come off a screen, the offense bogging down in the process, until it got to a point where somebody just needed to get a shot off before the shot clock buzzer sounded.
And then, on defense, while the good UVA teams of a few years ago seemed like they had six or seven guys on the floor, the way everybody was in constant motion with double-teams and help defense from all directions, Louisville made the Virginia kids look like the old Pep Band doing a scramble drill trying to get into formation for the next song.
It was unfair, to me, that Sanchez, talking with reporters after the game, attributed what we saw today to an issue with “energy.”
“We had to muster us some energy to play a lot harder than we were, which led into few little incisions of offensive rebounding, giving up second chances, not getting back in transition, things of that nature, that allowed them to really get a really good rhythm offensively,” Sanchez said.
Seriously, the real issue here isn’t energy, effort or lack thereof – it’s the square peg-in-a-round hole thing that I’ve been writing about for two months.
The roster that Sanchez and Bennett put together last spring isn’t ideal, to say the least, for playing Tony Bennett Basketball, but then, that’s all that Sanchez and the rest of the Bennett holdovers know.
That’s why you saw a team struggling to get guys open with the screening action in the mover/blocker trying to do the same thing over and over and hope for a different result, why you saw Kelsey exploit the Pack Line with spacing that allowed his guards to dribble-drive UVA defenders into oblivion.
There were no adjustments there, either.
And there don’t seem to be any coming.
They’re going to try to do what they haven’t been able to do yet, just harder.
The end of an era is never easy.
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Chris Graham
