Conventional wisdom has it that Virginia needs Wednesday night’s game with Duke. Duke, the Duke players, at least, might need it more.
On the Virginia side, there’s maybe one future NBA player, 6’3” sophomore guard Reece Beekman, and the emphasis in the first part of this sentence needs to be firmly on the “maybe” and “future,” and I’m not implying “near future” there, to be clear.
The Duke side has four projected 2022 first-round picks – freshmen Paolo Banchero, A.J. Griffin and Trevor Keels, and junior Wendell Moore.
Those four, plus sophomore center Mark Williams, a projected second-rounder, have a lot to play for Wednesday night.
Duke only lost the first game between the two by a point, and it took a three with 1.1 seconds left, from Beekman, to make that happen, but it happened because the future NBA ballers got outplayed by guys who will go on to careers in something other than sports.
That assessment may be a bit harsh for 6’6” Virginia forward Jayden Gardner, who I can see getting on in the G League, though his future is more likely overseas, but back on Feb. 7, Gardner thoroughly outclassed Banchero, who started the season as the prohibitive favorite to be the top pick in the 2022 draft, and has slid as far as sixth in the most recent mocks.
Banchero was bothered early by Virginia’s post-to-post doubles, but in 20 second-half minutes, in which he only got off one shot, a wild three that hit the side and top of the backboard at the buzzer, he almost exclusively floated aimlessly around the perimeter, shying away from contact, not demanding the ball, and when he did get it in his hands, he turned it over three times.
Gardner, meanwhile, led Virginia with 17 points, and while it took 19 shots to get them, he knocked down big shot after big shot against Duke’s man and zone.
That Mike Krzyzewski had to go zone for the bulk of the last 30 minutes was because Virginia dominated the paint against his supposedly better athletes, to the tune of scoring 52 points in the paint.
Gardner had his 17, and Virginia’s bigs had a combined 24 – 16 from Kadin Shedrick, on 8-of-8 shooting, and Francisco Caffaro had eight, on 3-of-5 shooting.
Coach K playing zone was him waving the white flag saying that his bigs couldn’t guard Virginia’s bigs, and acknowledging that his guards couldn’t keep Virginia’s guards out of the lane.
Kihei Clark, Virginia’s 5’9”-ish point guard, had eight points and nine assists, and controlled the pace and flow of the game in the second half, when Duke made a series of runs at the ‘Hoos.
Kihei Clark is a great college point guard, but that’s his ceiling as a basketball player – and yet, there he was, consistently getting past Keels, Moore and Jeremy Roach, a five-star prep recruit who is no doubt pegged for an NBA career when he’s done at Duke.
Beekman, the one “maybe” as far as NBA goes on the Virginia roster, actually got just 25 minutes of floor time in Durham because of foul trouble – the result of bad luck, a couple of cheapies – meaning Tony Bennett had to go with sophomore walk-on Malachi Poindexter for long stretches.
The 6’2” Poindexter ended up getting 14 minutes. Two years ago, Poindexter was scoring 13 points a game at St. Anne’s-Belfield and thinking about where he was going to apply to go to college.
There’s no good reason why he should be able to hold his own against future NBA first-rounders for 14 minutes, but he did.
There will be a glut of NBA scouts at Wednesday’s game, and they’ve already seen the Duke kids play in that marquee game in Vegas against Gonzaga, against another crop of kids who are on their way to the NBA.
The scouts know what these kids can do at their best against the best.
The NBA is a grind, kinda like a mid-February game in the ACC is a grind, on the road, a sellout crowd thirsty for blood, against a team that will control tempo, keep you from getting to your spots.
These Duke kids are no more interested in winning a sixth national title for Coach K than the much more talented group that flamed out before the Final Four in 2019 was.
Duke is nothing more than a line on their resume.
But they’ve got something to play for Wednesday night.
Coach K, who concocted a fabulous tale about Virginia playing Ralph Sampson 40 minutes in a blowout ACC Tournament win over Duke in 1983 to motivate his teams for these games for decades, is no doubt reminding his kids that the scouts will be taking notes on how they respond to having been outplayed in the first matchup two weeks ago.
It’s a few million dollars here or there for those guys.
All Virginia’s kids are playing for is … Virginia Pride.
The pressure is on Duke.
Story by Chris Graham
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