Alright - first game recap Cuts for the season! Some high level thoughts, a focus on TDR and Chance, very brief look at our transition game, and then a focus on a couple of different aspects of our defensive design (creating chaos and defending ball screens).
Please excuse any lack of editing on these due to timeline. Thanks, as always, for reading!
I was a defender of the defense during the game thread.
Re-watching the clips though, I do have some concern about our guards ability to fight through ball screens and laterally stay in front of the guard when the competition rises.
I don’t know what the solution is - it may mean more Chance / Eli minutes. I think Hall may just be limited. I think Jacari may have room for improvement. And potentially Malik becomes more engaged on the defensive end to reshape identity once he realizes he doesn’t have to carry the burden offensively as he may have in the past.
Here is what I saw live through my uneducated lens.
Flash #11, was the only player on Rider who could shoot, pass and find any offense.
UVa offense was fine inside the paint, bad at 3PTs & FTs
Some of the fouls seemed like they were ticky tack both ways
Odom started doubling #11 once he got the ball in half court sets… which seemed to work better
UVa 3PT got better… FT did not
Ticky tack fouls continued until the end… the 3 fouls by Rider in the first 40 seconds of the 2nd half was impressive.
Free throw motion for most of the UVa players looked awkward… except for Malik, who had the purest FT motion I’ve ever seen. He needs to teach everyone else.
On the transition game, I know I poked fun at the slow pace in the game thread, but this was a case where they did get into transition a lot, but then worked the clock down when in the half court. Play types from the game from Hoop Explorer: Hoop Explorer
Above the bars are [frequency/100 possessions] x [efficiency in terms of PPP], so transition was 28.7 plays per 100 possessions and they had 1.09 PPP on them (unadjusted). The frequency number is 94th percentile currently and the efficiency is 50th percentile.
We found lots of way to manufacture “easy” buckets. Second chance points, transition points, etc. When you shoot 27% from three and 56% from the FT line, and still score 1.36 points per possession, you have to find some other ways to score, and we did. Helps that we were dominant inside the paint (65% from 2).
It was a very pragmatic approach, taking their advantages over a much worse team and just grinding them out over and over again. I expect them to play a little differently against teams that have less of a talent deficit, but I appreciate the desire to just step on the opponent’s throat in whichever way is most available.
That approach worked against Rider. Would it work against a real team? Nope.
It’s early, but we need to shoot better. Without three point shooting, Odom’s offense would be a disaster. Virginia needs to shoot above 40% as a team to be roughly in the top 50 shooting teams, which is probably the minimum for Virginia to succeed with Odom’s offense. Was 27% against Rider an anomaly? I hope so. Thomas was 1-6. Hall was 1-5. White was 2-7. Those three were our volume shooters. They were collectively 4-18. That’s 22% shooting from some of our ‘best’ shooters. Do we need De Ridder and Lewis to shoot more? Or do we just need Thomas and White to get on track?
Hall is a career 35% shooter from deep, so he really should only take them when he’s either wide open or really late in the clock.
I think NCC, which has atrocious perimeter defense, is a great opportunity for Virginia to get their shooting on track.
Malik came out early from halftime and took about a dozen 3PT with Lang and Owen Odom.
I thought they all shouldve come out a few minutes early.
You could tell he was frustrated with his shot. And he was getting mauled out there.
It won’t be an anomaly; it will happen again (just the law of averages). Just hope when it happens we are either much better than the other team or keep finding other ways to score.
Plus games are dynamic and stochastic.** Is that the right word? You react to what’s going on. If that’s a close game (beyond the 1H with TDR foul trouble), we probably force them to stop TDR and/or the pick and roll, etc.
** I looked it up. No, probably not the right word.
Obviously the shooting will need to be better, but if we’re going to reach our ceiling, being awesome inside will be a part of that.
Great job, as always @Cuts_from_The_Corner .
That was pretty cringey. It reads like an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.
I’m with Cuts on that. Just good home fan hygiene. Not a big deal by any means.
Yup. Just some housekeeping, not that serious.
But we should definitely stop icing our own shooters.
I love the philosophy of always testing the defense (and on the other side too) to see if they’ll give you something easy first.
I think TDR is going to scale with the competition and will be reliable against most anyone. We’ll see about everyone else.
What do you think philosophically about the off-ball switching on “soft” actions (e.g. little wing exchange that Malik and Chance messed up and gave up an open 3 on)? I don’t really see the benefit to that switch and it seems like you might make it too easy to end up in a bad match-up, but maybe it’s just easier for players to know they need to be switching everything.
One game undergrad at U-Hall, one of our players was at the FT line (I think it was Jason Clark). It was quiet enough to hear a pin drop. Unfortunately, I was so sleep deprived and delirious from studying for exams, I suddenly launched into my non-stop “OHHHHHHHHHHHH” that I did for opponents shooting FTs. My friend punched me in the stomach to shut me up and the shooter looked right at me after the shot and mouthed “what the fuck.” I still get cold sweats thinking about it.
Yeah I don’t love it. Especially if TDR or Chance are one of the players.
It might be just to make it less confusing for now until communication tightens and that would be my preference… if teams are hard set on hunting mismatches, though, they will make that happen with harder screens… so I’m not sure it’s overly meaningful in the end.
Long term we’ll need a response if, say, NC State keeps getting Chance switched onto Darrion or something, though.
Tell Chance to just steal the ball from him. To Chance’s perspective, the ball will have to travel a mile every time it gets dribbled.
