Heard this '16-17 comparison a lot and totally disagree with it.
Virginia's primary offensive pieces are simply not capable of carrying things for the Cavaliers when they turn the ball over the way that they did today.
Reminds me of the 16-17 season in Charlottesville.
That team had veteran guards. A 4th year starting PG, and 3 more juniors to go along with 2 promising first years. You have to go back to Bennett’s early years to find a team without a fairly veteran backcourt. That’s been a huge part of the success. Get old and stay old as they say. In our case, they’ve typically spent their first year or two as role players at best soaking in the culture. We don’t have that benefit this year.
If you need a comparison, '11-12 might be the best with Mamadi as the new Mike Scott. Kihei playing Jontel. Morsell as freshman Brogdon. The difference is our few vets are Bennett’s recruits that have been brought up in the culture. That and fan expectations are way higher.
The biggest issue was the turnovers. I didnt think our defense was awful, The thing that killed us though was surprisingly Bolden who averages 9 points a game had 22 on 8-13 shooting…I think their game plan was to exploit Clarks height. Im curious how this happens when Clark did such a great job on a more talented Cole Anthony. When teams can hit the outside shots, that is when we are in for a long game.
I thought Jay Bilas had a perfect analogy. You cant expect your star pitcher to throw a shut out every game. Batters will hit the ball no matter how perfect of a pitcher you have. So of course you have to have some offensive production. I feel the same with our defense. Good shooters can and at times and will hit outside shots against us. Our offense must be able to respond or else we will lose games.
The good thing is we are 2-0 starting ACC play soon. And this loss is a good reality check and hopefully we can continue to improve on offense. In our only other loss was against a strong defensive Perdue team, we only had 40 points. Tonight we were at 59, close to our season high of 65 which is improvement I hope.
I hate to say this but Kehei has got too much responsibility put on him. Practically everyone dribbled onto into trouble and made bad passes. Kehei has done a decent job but there are times when he needs some help I hope I’m wrong but we are gonna have a hard time once the ACC cranks up
As for improvement, I think we have seen some…just that it’s been game to game with diff individual players and never shown up in one game. And I’ll again stick to the Bennett early years theme where we often did struggle in the non-con season before putting it together. Even the breakout '13-14 team had the awful pre-Jan. I don’t know how high this team’s ceiling is but I do expect eventually it’ll click all of a sudden. That seems to be how it works under Tony for some reason.
I personally think the offense has gotten better. Stattman, Morsell, Tomas, who were the focus of our frustrations earlier in the season are finding their roles, and shooting a bit better. Im not saying they are great, There’s certainly lots of room to improve…Turnovers were just a killer tonight…But also South Carolina is evidentially not a bad team. I think we all have to lower our expectations a bit. We lost some very talented guys last year that we were not expecting to lose. Grateful to be 9-2 and 2-0 in the ACC.
I also agree that the turnovers were the biggest issue. South Carolina made a lot of contested shots but they also got some easy buckets in the lane and off turnovers. I hope something starts to click or I’m afraid we are just gonna be waiting for next year
Hey guys, I have a question. The only game I missed this year was the Arizona State game. I know we come back from a big deficit to win the game. How did that game compare to today’s game?
Short answer is South Carolina was way better today than ASU was. UVA couldn’t string together enough stops in the 2nd half, or stop shooting themselves with turnovers.
Agree SC was way better check ASU v St Marys from Thursday. The hoos offense shot poorly agaisnt ASU. The Hoos offense was non functional with the TOs today
What I really like about this blog is the great recruiting coverage by HoozGotNext. I enjoy reading write-ups a lot this year as I am tending more and more to focus on the future since the team is showing weaknesses that persist. While Team doing well this year, the future seems really bright next year with Hauser, Abdur-Rahim, Beekman, and McCorkle.
Growing pains, growing pains, growing pains. Was it tough to watch? Absolutely. Is it worth wasting key strokes to critique everything that went wrong? I don’t think so. Simply put, this will go down as the worst game of most these players’ careers in a Virginia uniform. Let’s leave it at that.
Good news, as others have pointed out, is that we’re 9-2 and, more importantly, undefeated in the conference with the UNC win secured. Braxton is back on the court, Tomas and Kody finally look like they can hang, and Mamadi is showing that he can be the leader the team needs. His post-game interview was of a man, not a boy, who looks ready to shoulder the burden this season is placing on him.
Let’s give the kids some credit for even fighting back in this one. It’s tough when you’re going against a lights-out shooter and a hyper-aggressive defense that is already difficult for a UVa-style team to play against, made even more so when we’re struggling to knock down open looks. Don’t be surprised if we close this same situation out with a win 8 weeks from now.
This is just part of the 19-20 story. I’m convinced that we’re going to look back on this and marvel about how much these young men grew from this game. Go Hoos!