These guys are the best in the business. Seems like a reasonable spot for us.
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Me tooâŚdidnât think weâd be in their top 50.
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Good stuff.
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Thatâs the real question, isnât it? Among other things, it isnât just that this yearâs edition of the 'Hoos is deeper, I think that there is more balance. If nothing else, there is more size in the front court than last year. That said, question abound, and much will depend on the answers we discover.
- While I donât think that there is a comparable replacement for Beekman on this yearâs squad, is one of the point guards an adequate replacement? Can more than one do it?
- Who will complement McKneelyâs outside shooting with their own outside shooting? And, will it be more than one of Murray, Power, Saunders, & Sharma? Or, even, Cofie? Based on their histories, I donât expect much in this area from Ames or Warley, but you never know.
- Learning defensive assignments (and switches) in Coach Bennettâs systems has always been more difficult for front court players. How quickly will any of the newcomers earn his trust? How many? And, how many will redshirt if they take too long?
There are so many variables which remain unknown. Virginia could be better, the same, or worse. I, for one, look forward to discovering the answers.
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I understand that the staff saw everything in the games that fans did⌠thatâs why itâs disappointing.
Groves shot basically 46% from three on 109 attempts. Thatâs good by any measure and any distribution.
Letâs do the Dunn thing. Firstly, one issue was clearly a confidence thing from the extremity of this timidness late in the season compared to how he took chances without hesitation early. The guidance he was given, and this has been given to other bigs as well, was just to focus on defense and rebounding.
But he wasnât a disaster of an offensive player - he scored 8ppg despite all of it.
He wasnât an outside shooter, and he wasnât a great screener. He was pretty solid at finishing when he got some momentum toward the basket. He was good at cleaning up buckets around the rim. He could pressure the rim.
So, firstly - one of the worst things you can do with players like that is camp them stationary at the three-point line and let their man sag into the lane, which is what we did that majority of the time. We basically tried to play 5-on-4 when he was in and told him to crash the glass. Now, even within what we did, there are more focused things he could do. When another player drives and his man is in position to pick them up, have him immediately dive toward the rim and have your man look for the pass or for a lob to him. He did that once in a blue moon. It wasnât regular or intentional and it wasnât a set strategy. Two, when you get the ball on the perimeter and your man isnât guarding you, drive it into the lane (assuming you wonât shoot), drive it into the lane, eliminate the distance, and either try to score with that momentum (youâre the most athletic player on the floor) or kick it out and let the offense reset around that action. Attack the sag. Also - Rohde was a slow-footed driver who wasnât shooting and so he was NO threat to drive when a player was sagging like that (McKneely really wasnât either). If youâre not going to change the way you run offense, put someone like Eli in there who is athletic enough to get by or challenge the help side defense even when they are cheating.
But, there are also MANY other things you can do if youâre willing to explore. Keep him around the rim more, on the block, in the short corner, so that his man canât give him as much space and if they do itâs a dump off. Use him to set and have set Princeton screens. Curl him around screens at the elbow or set screens on his man (wherever heâs playing) and get him going downhill so that he catches the ball with momentum and has a running start (where he did well). Use that Maverickâs play where he sets a ball screen (so his man canât sag because he has to hedge⌠or if he does sag, the guard has space) and then you set a back screen for Dunn and throw him the ball at the rim. Isolate him in the high post against slower players and let him drive on them. Try to get him switched onto a smaller player and then just let him post up. Let another big like Minor post up and have Dunn pressure the rebound on the opposite block. These are all basketball concepts that teams at both the collegiate and pro level use for players who are athletic and mobile but not good shooters.
But you have to be willing to invest the time and energy into practicing them and rolling them out and then trying them in live action and being intentional about them. And thatâs not an exhaustive list of ideas - but Iâve given you a LOT of ideas in this thread.
These things are not radical or abstract concepts and weâve seen a wide range of teams utilize them. And yes, it may have taken some tinkering to know what worked best, which again required time and focus on something that maybe CTB didnât want to be focusing on - but the premise that none of any of that would have been helpful because CTB would have done it if it would have is flawed. There are so many lines available - asserting that the perfect one has no difference from what we always do and had such poor results is not believable.
What we did do and decide to stick with week after week, game after game, was very bad on that side of the ball. And thatâs the other thing - you donât have to try new things during the rare games when the offense is playing well⌠but not to explore this stuff in the middle of the games where we have under 20 at the half because we âknowâ none of that would help?
Stripped down, the argument becomes, âCTB never makes mistakesâ and itâs folly to say that he always finds the most optimized line. CTB makes mistakes all the time just like every single coach in the country does - but he also does more things incredibly well and there are few people in the country who would do the totality of the job better.
We donât need to feel threatened for CTB - we all know heâs great and he has infinite job security⌠so itâs my opinion we should call a spade a spade when aspects of what weâre doing arenât working.
As a parting thought on this - itâs clear that CTB agrees he didnât take an optimized line last year with the offense based on this offseason. So, if a strategy that appears bad is actually optimal because CTB saw it and took no observable action, and he is always right⌠but also he thinks he made some mistakes last year⌠and heâs always correct⌠
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Except that I donât think that Groves ever shot 46% from behind the arc for a single game. Typically, he was above 50%, if not 60%, or he was under 20% (and sometimes 0%). For the most part, when he was hot, Virginiaâs offense looked good. When he wasnât, the offense struggled. Furthermore, none of our discussion has addressed how much of the problem was related to properly executing the offense. Experience was an issue there. Regardless, I doubt that either one of us is going to change the mind of the other. Iâm going to just let it be for now.
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Itâs difficult to execute any offense when:
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It doesnât suit your personnel.
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It has few counters when defenses adjust (sagging off Dunn, chasing IMac, etc.)
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The offense doesnât inherently space the floor well.
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You only have 1 or 2 shot creators and 1 or 2 deep threats.
You can execute all you want, but you have a capped ceiling of what proper execution will yield, unless youâre playing crappy defensive teams like FSU, BC, or GT.
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You basically just described the difference between large sample size and small sample size statistics. When you shoot 4 times in a given game, youâre absolutely right, heâs not going to hit 46%.
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Iâll also add to my previous statement that itâs extremely difficult to score when you have a poor shooting team AND you place absolutely no emphasis whatsoever on the offensive glass. I LOVE Tony Bennett. Heâs incredible. However, possibly my biggest point of contention with him over the years is the complete disregard for offensive rebounding.
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UVA and Houston both shot 43.4% from the field last year and both shot below 70% from the FT line. The difference? Houston was 6th in the country in offensive rebound percentage, and Virginia was 283rd. You canât not shot well AND also not crash the offensive glass. You have to do at least one of the two. And Houston also doesnât seem to have too much of a problem stopping transition opportunities for the opponent, so thatâs not a valid excuse. I get really irritated watching 1 guy crash when weâve gone scoreless for 5 minutes.
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Go back and look at the UVA box scores from the 2019 title run. We had double digit offensive rebounds in every game but Auburn (ok⌠9 against Oklahoma) We had 17 against Purdue. That is the single biggest reason we beat Purdue in that game. We had double the number of offensive rebounds. Itâs SO incredibly important, especially when you inevitably have an off shooting night in March, to be a good offensive rebounding team. Houston, Purdue, and Connecticut were all top 12 offensive rebounding teams this year and were widely considered the top 3 teams in the country.
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Austin my dude. Post more.
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This is a really good point, and one that I (and probably many others) didnât really think about
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I probably focus on it a bit too much, because itâs something my dad and I have always discussed as one of the (very) few things weâd change about the way Tony does things. I know some people wish heâd increase our pace, but I actually would rather see an increased emphasis on offensive rebounding than an increased pace of play. Just a personal preference.
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Interesting question is why we had those Oreb numbers in 2019? Was that intentional? Personnel going rogue?
Iâve often wondered that. I have no idea. It wasnât even just the bigs, although Jack Salt and Mamadi were absolute monsters on the glass in that game. I saw Guy crash several times.
P.S. This may be an unpopular opinion, but Iâve rewatched that Purdue game several times. Jack Salt, for what he is, played absolutely out of his mind that game. Under the radar MVP.
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Jack absolutely was the understated MVP against Purdue in the same way Kihei was against Oregon. The way Jack, bad back and all, just completely took Matt Haarms out of the game, made him invisible, gets so overlooked.
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Surprisingly I thought Jack was our best perimeter defender that game too⌠any time he hedged on Carsen he wasnât getting a shot off. That was literally our only way of âslowing him downâ
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I think groves was a litmus test of our offense. Heâs a lot like seeing who dominated on the ground in football, check how he played and you can usually guess who won the game. However I think he was a product more than a driving force of anything, heâd take what he was given every game but wasnât gonna hatch anything up out of thin air. Offense is playing well = groves will play well, offense bad = groves plays bad
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My working theory is that you need guys good enough and with enough confidence. Then Tony will trust them to step outside of the bounds of the system a bit in healthy ways (like what youâre describing).
Of course you can have less talented guys that he could choose to trust more. I donât know that the results would be much better. Or you can change the âapproachâ in ways that offer players generally feel like they have more freedom to mess up.
I dunno my thoughts are still half formed on this. But I feel like thereâs something there
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People sometimes talk crap about Jack Saltâs offensive game, but I agree with this take that he was huge against Purdue:
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If you only play 7 or 8 are you actually deeper? Lots to ponder here in August
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