Music blared through loudspeakers at the John Paul Jones Arena for Wednesday’s UVA basketball practice.
Coach Tony Bennett allows this?
“I guess he’s trying something new,” junior point guard London Perrantes told reporters at the program’s Media Day, a few minutes before practice.
Perrantes and his teammates were “surprised” when Bennett went all DJ on them.
“It started one day when we had some recruits in here. We thought he was putting out the red carpet for them. Like, come on, Coach, we don’t do this. But he’s been doing it ever since,” said Perrantes, one of three returning starters on the sixth-ranked Cavs, who open the 2015-2016 season on Nov. 13 against Morgan State.
Throw Mike Tobey and Evan Nolte, each of whom started 11 games last season, into the mix, and you’ve got five players who made double-digit starts, and with sophomores Marial Shayok, Devon Hall and Isaiah Wilkins a total of eight players who averaged at least nine minutes a game returning.
It’s a deep, experienced, veteran team that takes the floor to music for stretches, drills and scrimmages at JPJ. But don’t let the thumping bass fool you: Bennett isn’t taking his foot off the gas pedal.
“It’s not any different. I think he holds us to a higher standard,” Perrantes said.
Bennett conceded that he did tweak his approach in the offseason a bit, actually quite a bit.
“What we did this summer was we played a lot of three-on-three,” said Bennett, offering that the idea was that “you’ve got to use your summers in different ways,” and focusing on three-on-three drills was meant to put offensive skills development in the forefront.
Perrantes said the team didn’t do “one defensive drill” all summer, which he felt “helped our bodies, not putting that grind on our bodies.”
“It shows offensively as well,” Perrantes said.
Offense will be a focal point across the country as the NCAA goes to a 30-second shot clock this year, cutting five seconds off the shot clock in an effort to speed up play and boost scoring. Bennett thinks more teams will use 2-2-1 zones to try to chew time off the shot clock, “then they’ll fall back into zones, soft man-to-man. So there’s different things that people will probably do with the clock.”
He’s had his team working on offense against those kinds of defensive schemes. He’s also been preaching to his team that it needs to be more aggressive offensively.
“You have to be purposeful as far as getting the ball up the floor. Get it up, get into your offense quick, and if there’s opportunities, whether it’s a turnover or an action, run, but I don’t know how much different it will look right now,” Bennett said. “We’re certainly trying to look at some things with that shot clock, getting the ball up quicker when there’s opportunities to get into your offense, to have time, or take advantage of some transition baskets.”
Aggressiveness won’t just come in transition. Senior guard Malcolm Brogdon said the Cavs will need to focus in its half-court offense on “getting the ball inside, playing inside-out, but also the guards have to touch the paint more.”
Brogdon will be looked to step up what he does to jumpstart the offense. “I think every year I get better at finding and picking my spots, where to be aggressive, and where to make the extra pass,” Brogdon said. “I think this year I’ll have to be a little more aggressive, but also still find that balance of when to score and when to pull it out and run offense so we can get a better shot.”
Bennett will lean on Brogdon in that respect, and wants to see Perrantes look for his shot a little bit more.
“He doesn’t have to go outside of himself and be somebody he’s not. But he has the ability to knock down shots. We’ve seen that. We talk about needing to replace some of these other guys. My hope is he’ll have more assertiveness, within reason, looking for his offensive game,” Bennett said.
All this focus on offense might obscure the fact that Virginia wasn’t exactly chopped liver with the ball in 2014-2015. The ‘Hoos ranked 24th nationally in points per possession, according to KenPom.com, and before losing Justin Anderson to injury were a top-five offensive team.
But it was it was because of a historically bad offensive night that UVA was bounced out of the NCAA Tournament by Michigan State for a second straight year. Virginia shot just 29.8 percent from the floor in a 60-54 loss.
That’s why Bennett put so much energy into offense this summer, to the point where he let things slide a bit on the other side of the floor.
“This summer, I just bit my tongue sometimes with what I saw defensively. I figure you only have so many bullets to get after them, and I saved them for the start of it as far as the defense goes,” Bennett said.
But make no mistake. What Virginia does well – the Cavs ranked first in the nation in defensive efficiency in 2014-2015, according to KenPom.com – is back at the forefront with the music livening up the practices.
“We had a full summer full of offensive stuff. So it’s defense now. It’s always defense,” Perrantes said. “He’s going to hit that nail on the head until we’ve got it. We all know that that’s what we rely on, so that’s just what we do. That’s nothing new.”
– Story by Chris Graham
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