UVA Basketball 2022-2023 Post Mortem Thread/Transfer out thread

Men's Basketball
1

A true honest discussion of the past UVA basketball season

If you think we are all ungrateful “armchair generals” this may not be the thread for you.

If you enjoy bringing up aspects just to be negative or contrarian this also may not be the thread for you

You can still love and appreciate things you criticize. And just because something can be brought up does not mean it’s relative to what is being discussed.

Everyone of course is invited to post, whether it be veteran forum users/brand new people/people who lurk from afar/people who post the 10 paragraph data analysis/people who just want to post one or two sentences.

Please no personal attacks or personal attacks on players (something I need to remind myself of at times as well)

It’s St. Patricks day so please no drunk posting either LOL. Just come back during the week when you want to kill time at work and post.

12 Likes
2

If you had to pick one, what has the biggest shortcoming of this year’s team?

  • Lack of consistent 3pt shooting
  • Lack of an additional play maker/shot creator
  • Inability to generate defensive stops when needed
  • Lack of consistent front court production
  • Our mental psyche/going through the motions/lack of fire on the court
  • Our length athleticism and height across the board without playing lineups that complimented other players
  • Rebounding shortcomings/inability to grab boards at critical moments

0 voters

3

What was, in your opinion, the best take away from this season?

  • The flashes of 3pt shooting showing what we could look like/how we used to look like
  • Tony’s willingness to experiment on the offensive end and trade offense for defense for the future
  • The moments where we were pushing the ball a little more
  • The development of Isaac McKneely and Ryan Dunn
  • Reece’s growth as a lead guard
  • Just finally making the tournament/flashes we showed in Las Vegas

0 voters

4

Which of these do you think is the biggest factor in explaining our history of struggling in the first round games win or lose?

  • Pace of play
  • 3pt defense with packline and inability to match 3pt shooting of other teams
  • Inability to match intensity of low seeds with nothing to lose/no confidence or players that can create something out of nothing/overcoached+system vs playing with confidence

0 voters

5

How are you feeling after this basketball season relative to your preseason expectations? 1 being the worst and 5 being the best/ 5 out of 5.

  • 5
  • 4
  • 3
  • 2
  • 1

0 voters

6

How are you feeling long-term about UVA basketball? Same metric as above, 5 best/1 worst

  • 5
  • 4
  • 3
  • 2
  • 1

0 voters

7

My postmortem is that the season got reallly weird after Reece’s injury. And any other takes I might monger will have to wait until we see who transfers out. But the short of it is, if reece, all the 2022s, and Kadin come back, then I think this season was a great success where they won a lot of new games and gave some run to the new guys.

If our roster is looted by departures and transfers because we entered “win now” mode too soon, I will be disappointed with a R64 exit

21 Likes
8

Rewatching from 50-38, because I’m a sicko…

We’ve all talked about the 1-3-1 but the other big thing that happened is Slawson just took over the game. Gardner couldn’t guard him. He baited him on the perimeter and would drive and when Jayden didn’t stay up on him, he hit threes.

(Slawson scored on Dunn, too, but inefficiently. He’d back down Dunn with booty ball and get bailed out with a call, and Dunn would block the shot)

So Tony put back in Dunn and he immediately gets the steal and then gets hammered by Slawson and just a common foul…

Slawson was the best player on the court and he basically got rid of the only player who was stopping him.

15 Likes
9

I personally don’t think there’s much to post mortem about THIS season. We overachieved given the pieces and can be proud of what we accomplished in the regular season.

Had a 5th year senior not made the dumbest play of his career we’re preparing to play a very winnable game to advance to the S16.

I don’t think this game fit the narrative of other first round losses. We were 5 point favorites because the computers knew we weren’t as good as our record (true) and we were on pace to cover had we hit our free throws down the stretch.

10 Likes
10

Not only did he maul Dunn, but the 1-3-1 made Dunn unplayable on offense because he can’t pass or shoot very well. So you need Gardner to be in the middle of the zone (unless you had Traudt or BVP) and Gardner got destroyed

4 Likes
11

Credit Hien. I mostly thought he was a scrub watching live but he made a number of smart plays down the stretch. The obvious one, sure, but he was often in the right place at the right time. And he was out front of the 1-3-1 with active hands, feet. He had a key board and put back when Kadin left him to bloack a shot, and nobody stepped in to block him out.

Shoulda switched to 4 guard earlier. Armaan is doing just fine on Slawson.

@AnonymooseHoo dontthink we needed Gardner. Needed to go 4 guard earlier, IM

Yeah, we are scoring every time after we go 4 guard plus Shed. And Richey goes back to man…

Big what if we n the whole season … why so little Shed plus 4 guard? That’s a great look!!

3 Likes
12

I would go with a 4th option here–we struggle in the postseason because Tony runs a system that allows us to play way above our talent level in the regular season, and that system doesn’t work as well in the postseason. Not so much we’re underachieving in postseason as overachieving in regular season. I think this could change with the 2022/2023 classes though

3 Likes
13

I agree and disagree. At this point I weigh NCAAT success far heavier than I did 5 years ago. I would much rather we turn the page to the Mich St model of under achieving in season leading to overachieving post season. I would much rather go 12-8/13-7 in league if that means we improve and peak in March to more consistent S16 and E8 runs. It’s not really close for me anymore either. AND YES, it’s nuts to even make those comments when thinking back over the past 10 years and then the 10 prior. To be fretting over an ACC Reg Season Title, an ACCT Final appreance and a 25 win season, BUT we are because of where we are as a program NOW. We either evolve and improve or we will l continue to tread water (which we have since the Natty) and slowly fade back to a mid tier top 25/30 program. I want to see something change next season, be it:

  1. Playing younger earlier and taking lumps to be improved and peaking latter
  2. Play with more of an edge/attitude (See teams from 2014-2019)
  3. More offensive freedom
  4. Tony improve in game and become more flexible
12 Likes
14

This is a great point that I have thought about as well. We have been the high seed a lot but when you look at the “talent” on those rosters is very unique compared to teams with similar seeds. Like you can’t convince me we had more talent (relative at the time out of HS and in college) than those Michigan State teams.

The system allows us to overachieve during a numerous game stretch (the regular season) but allows for the variance in 1 game samples + maybe hinders us in terms of recruiting the type of players we need to get over that hump. So im with you in that excitement for the 2022s/23s as well.

4 Likes
15

Just looking at the postseason losses, they all feel kind of different to me?

2023: Good defense, offense couldn’t generate many threes and didn’t hit the ones they had. Lost composure in key moments (not just the end of game, I think this applies to attacking the 1-3-1 too).
2021: Good defense, offense generated lots and lots of threes, as it had all season, and shot 11 percentage points below average.
2018: Had a lot of trouble with the small ball and got toasted on 3s. Our best 3pt shooters didn’t hit shots.
2017: Florida was pretty good that season too, we shot poorly on 3s after shooting well on them against UNC-W the game before.
2016: Gave up too many free throws, Malcolm shot horribly.
2015: Not a huge upset, MSU was a super-strong 7-seed. Not sure JA was 100%, only his 4th game back. Gave up approximately 1 million free throws when that was a season-long strength.

2021 was the most variance-y loss in my mind, as that was a ball-didn’t-go-in game. I’d be curious if others see different patterns in those losses.

4 Likes
16

Similar point to the one @Jerome made and how @HoozGotNext talked about the Furman game being sorta flukey; we collapsed but we came back. Other teams did the same as well yesterday and the day before (1st round scares are common to other teams too), just that we had another collapse in the dwindling seconds

4 Likes
17

This is why I chose the psychological aspect/playing tight answer for the consistent woes. Not one consistent thing on the court but all these issues stemming from tightness

5 Likes
18

Can we flesh this out a little more? What about the system do you think leads to overachieving talent level during the regular season but is more prone to 1-game variance?

For me, I think the amount of 3P attempts we allow schematically might be one factor, as that does increase the variance in a single game, but of course this cuts both ways. If you chart performance against seed expectations with defensive 3PA rate, the relationship changes between positive and negative depending on the year. For example, in 2019, 3 of the Final Four teams (UVA, TTU, Auburn) allowed opponents to take 40+% of their shots from 3.

1 Like
19

Sure, every game is different. There’s not gonna be easy answers like “Tony forgot to castle his bishops in every game” or whatever.

For me, the commonality is this: we play a low possession game which means there’s a premium on FAST adaptation within the game and we tend to both play slow and adapt slow, which can be fatal.

2023 - Richey hasn’t played or practiced the 1-3-1 in months but pulls it out. We haven’t played or practiced the 4-guard much, but don’t pull it out until they’ve taken the lead.

2021 - We are a great perimeter shooting team but just ice cold. But we don’t really switch to letting Reece attack the hoop and play a 2-man game with TM3 until like 5 minutes left. (Applying the main point - nobody is saying we shouldn’t have tried to use our strength, but we need to adapt quicker when plan A didn’t work)

2019 - focusing on G-W. Bad enough we decide to start Salt on Laster, but slow to switch personnel or coverage. And when we switch personnel we STILL don’t change the coverage. (But we won because our talent was so awesome — so let’s always try to have awesome talent!!)

2018 - big issue was crisis of confidence. Needed senior leadership, but instead our senior leaders were taking off the floor because of some arbitrary rule. We were soooo tight.

Beyond that, it gets fuzzy, tbh. I actually thought we made the right moves v UNC-W. Florida just gave us a whooping. In 2014, we chose to play even Nolte after AG got hurt. Tony even admitted that one.

In general, I think we tend to play a bit tight. Have a little more fun, play a little more loose. In that sense, I do think our error minimization strategy which is sound in the regular season causes us to clench buttholes a little too tightly in the tourney.

(Should also add that I think there three separate things here: (1) our 22-23 strategy to lean into Covid 5th year, (2) some multi-year roster building mistakes, and (3) March underperformance other than awesome natty year. There’s some overlap but I think they are 3 analytically distinct issues)

** addendum on 2018 - we needed to post Ty, and we did out of timeouts, but why didn’t Ty do it on his own? I think there’s a bit of fostered dependence in a way, and I know this is a bit blasphemous

8 Likes
20

Imagine if we just used timeouts lol

And this year was the one time Tony’s saving timeouts might have helped… but then we know what happened

4 Likes