Virginia’s up-and-down season – the up: four Top 25 wins; the down: home losses to Pitt, which went 8-24 this season, and Clemson, which finished 12-19 – could be at its end, fittingly, with a washout in the first round of the 2024 ACC Tournament with a 58-55 loss to Wake Forest, which had won two ACC games coming in.
And to top it all off, the Cavaliers (15-15), coming off their biggest win in years, an 80-75 upset of then-#5 Virginia Tech on Sunday, led by 11 points with eight minutes left, before going ice cold.
“Didn’t compete,” UVA coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton said after the game. “Credit to Wake Forest. They wanted it more, they played well, they’ve got three kids on that team that understand what it takes to make a run in this tournament. And so, we will be better for next year, but we didn’t play our game. We had a great game against Virginia Tech, and we didn’t play well tonight.”
It was the second straight year that Virginia lost a first-round ACC Tournament game to Wake Forest, which defeated the Cavaliers 68-57 in the first round a year ago.
UVA seemed destined to flip the script after an Edessa Noyan layup that extended the Cavaliers’ lead to 48-37.
But Virginia missed its next 11 shots, and Wake Forest (7-24) took advantage with a 20-1 run, finally taking the lead with 1:29 to go on an and-one from Alyssa Andrews that made it 50-49 Deacs.
UVA’s Jillian Brown missed from three with 1:12 left, and Wake’s Kaia Harrison scored a layup on a fast break seven seconds later to make it a three-point game.
Paris Clark turned the ball over on a traveling call with 51 seconds left, and Wake closed the game out by going 6-of-8 at the line in the final 45 seconds.
Irony being what it is, which is to say, cruel, Virginia connected on its last two shots – threes by Cam Taylor and Kymora Johnson, the latter coming with a second on the clock, making the final margin look better than it was.
Virginia, which had gone 20-of-41 (48.8 percent) from the floor through three, made just three of its 17 shots from the field in the fourth – going 1-of-15 before the two buckets in the final nine seconds.
Taylor had 18 points on 8-of-14 shooting to lead UVA. Johnson had 15 points, nine rebound and five assists for the ‘Hoos.
Wake got a game-high 25 points from Elise Williams.
The season may not be over for Virginia.
“We’re at 15-15. Hopefully we’ll get into some kind of postseason tournament. We’re eligible. And if we do, we’ve got to come back out and compete and want it,” Agugua-Hamilton said.
Her teams, to this point, are 30-30 in her two seasons; her team last year was also 15-15 after its ACC Tournament loss to Wake Forest, and did not get to extend its season in the WNIT because the roster was depleted by injuries.
A chance to play into March would be a benefit to Agugua-Hamilton’s young nucleus – Johnson (15.6 ppg, 5.4 assists/g) and Olivia McGhee (5.7 ppg), both Top 50 recruits, are freshmen; Clark (9.9 ppg, 4.6 rebounds/g), a five-star recruit in the Class of 2022, is a sophomore.
“Obviously, the future is very bright,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “We fought this season to get where we were. We’ve had some really good wins. Hopefully the season is not over. We’re going to build off of this, learn from this experience and get better. But it’s disappointing because we know what we could have done. Regrets are really hard to live with. If we do get into a postseason tournament, we’ve got to understand this feeling so it doesn’t happen again.”
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Chris Graham
