A team loses its leading scorer and player of the year candidate, as UVA has just had happen with Justin Anderson going on the shelf with a broken pinky on his shooting hand, and the season surely is headed to the dumpster.
It’s going to sound crude to put it this way, but this isn’t dad’s UVA basketball. Justin Anderson is not Ralph Sampson. He’s not even the team’s leading scorer anymore. In ACC play, he was a bit of a liability on offense, actually, shooting 37.4 percent from the floor and 36.4 percent from three.
In Virginia’s last six games, he averaged 9.3 points per game, shooting 32.7 percent from the floor and 28 percent from three. Saturday night against Louisville, Anderson was 1-for-9 from the floor (the one coming on an alley-oop throwdown) in 16 minutes in the first half before going down with the injury.
His defense, his ability to get to the rim, his energy, will be hard to replace, and no one guy will do it.
Junior Evan Nolte played 16 minutes in the second half in Anderson’s absence in the win over Louisville, and Nolte, a junior, in putting up pedestrian box-score numbers (three points, 1-of-2 shooting, one rebound, one foul, nothing else), had a nice stat line in the hockey plus-minus, a +11.
That means Virginia outscored Louisville by 11 in Nolte’s 24 minutes on the floor. Nolte’s plus-minus was by far the best among the nine Cavs who played Saturday night. Simplistic as that bit of data may be in telling you what goes on in a game, it says something about whether a guy is a liability or a contributor in his minutes on the floor.
(Anderson, in his 16 minutes, was a -2. Going 1-for-9 from the floor in 16 minutes will help push your effectiveness down in that respect.)
Those in UVA Nation wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth over the short-term future without Anderson in the rotation might want to look at these stat lines in considering how the next four weeks will go.
Louisville isn’t chopped liver; the Cardinals’ losses this season have come to Kentucky, Duke, UNC and now UVA. And Virginia was able to beat Louisville with the two being manned by Anderson going 1-for-9 from the floor in the first half and Nolte going 1-for-2 in the second half.
Expect to see Nolte get more minutes after his performance Saturday night. And don’t be surprised to see freshman Marial Shayok, whose minutes have been dwindling of late, but has been a consistent contributor off the bench, pressing Nolte for more of those minutes. Shayok is sort of a doppelganger to Anderson, athletic as all get-out, supremely confident, and an effective contributor offensively (41.3 percent from the field, 40 percent from three-point range).
Devon Hall could get some extra minutes, perhaps, mainly spelling Malcolm Brogdon and London Perrantes at the point, though Anderson doesn’t play much of a role in bringing the ball up the court except in transition, which isn’t a big part of the system with Bennett.
There was speculation, including from me, about Isaiah Wilkins eating up some of Anderson’s minutes at the two and three, but after sleeping a couple of hours on it, it’s clear that while Wilkins’ future seems to have him moving to the two-three in the Bennett system, he’s more valuable to the 2014-2015 Cavs as a stretch four providing frontcourt depth that was missing from the 2013-2014 Cavs. Not saying that you won’t see Bennett try to steal some minutes with Wilkins playing some three, maybe matching up against a big team like Florida State, where Wilkins could run ragged whichever of FSU’s skyscrapers would be assigned to him.
Back to Anderson: maybe this ends up being a blessing in disguise for him. I saw a message-board comment joking about how former UVA coach Pete Gillen would wisecrack about how, hey, at least he comes back with fresh legs, and sure, Anderson will come back with fresh legs for the stretch run. You have to wonder how much of his decline in productivity of late was due to tired legs, how much was due to him pressing to be the guy that people talked about being the team’s leading scorer and player of the year candidate, how much was just opposing defenses keying on him and executing.
Whatever was the case, he hadn’t been the team’s best offensive option for several weeks, and was really becoming almost a black hole, again kind of putting that a bit crudely. Aside from his 6-for-10 shooting in the win at UNC on Monday, Anderson hadn’t shot 50 percent or better from the field since the Jan. 13 win over Clemson, and he’d shot 50 percent or better just three times in 10 ACC games.
As Anderson was struggling to regain his November-December form, the Cavs had once again become Brogdon’s team, with the first-team All-ACC’er averaging 13.3 points per game in ACC play, shooting 43.6 percent from the field (48-of-110) and 41.0 percent from three (16-of-39).
Opponents, starting with N.C. State Wednesday night, will be able to key on Brogdon, which means Perrantes (5.6 points and 4.6 assists per game, with outlier outputs of 26 points and eight assists in the win at Miami and 15 points and six assists in the win at UNC) will have to step up, Anthony Gill (11.0 points and 6.6. rebounds per game for the season on 56.7 percent shooting, but at 8.3 points and 5.9 rebounds per game on 48.4 percent shooting in ACC play) will have to step up.
It would be nice to get more consistent output from Mike Tobey (7.7 points and 5.4 rebounds per game on 52.7 percent shooting) and Darion Atkins (7.2 points and 6.1 rebounds per game on 51.3 percent shooting), but even if they just continued putting up those numbers on a regular basis, that could be enough.
A little more from Brogdon, a little more from Perrantes and Gill, have Nolte/Shayok play good D, hit open shots and move the ball in place of Anderson, and the Cavs can ride out the soft spot in the schedule between now and the Louisville rematch on March 7.
Virginia won’t win a national title without Anderson in the mix later on, but you can’t win a national title in February and early March anyway.
Bottom line: This team still wins the ACC regular season. After that, it’s a crap shoot, but that’s no different now than it was this time yesterday.
– Column by Chris Graham
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