Virginia Falls to Georgia Tech; What's Wrong Exactly? - SCACCHoops.com

Virginia Falls to Georgia Tech; What's Wrong Exactly?

by UniversityBall.org

Posted: 1/10/2016 11:13:57 AM


Yesterday in Atlanta continued a few unfortunate trends for Virginia basketball: the Jackets drilled threes with impunity (8-15, 53.3%), pushed us around on the offensive boards (rebounding a silly 32.3% of their own misses) and used the combination of those chances to run an efficient (1.11 points per possession and a 50% assist rate) and occasionally explosive (who ever would have predicted that from a Brian Gregory team? Not me) offense.

Our guys again came out of the gate dreadfully slow (trailing 19-9 at the 10 minute mark and by 11 at the half), used a furious effort to rally, and then — just as in Blacksburg five days prior — sputtered to the finish line in losing to an opponent they shouldn’t have lost to. The 11-0 run after we’d finally tied it at 49 was tortuous, and shocking because it came when Tony shelved a lineup of Tobey/Wilkins/Nolte/Shayok/London and brought Malcolm and AG back in.

I’m not going to pick nits with this game, because I think everything that went wrong against Georgia Tech can be found on the list of things that have been going wrong all season. I’m going to focus on that instead.

So what’s wrong?

1.) We really miss having dominant team defenders anchoring things on the perimeter and down low. This is point one with a bullet. Our struggles this season are a testament to how great Darion Atkins, Akil Mitchell, Joe Harris, and Justin Anderson were as team defenders. I’m not even talking strictly physically, though all four of those guys were exemplary stoppers. I mean that they communicated, helped, and controlled everything outside of their own environs as well. They didn’t just know the Pack Line, they were the Pack Line.

We have plenty of capable individual perimeter defenders on this year’s team, but none of them — Darius comes to mind first, but none of the returnees has shown me much, either — seem to be as immersed in the team concept as the departed. Malcolm is an exceptional one on one defender, but sometimes becomes so obsessed with stopping his man that he forgets about screens or what is happening off the ball. Darius is a gambler, which is fine when it results in turnovers and transition chances, but hurts when your teammates don’t have your back. Opponents have 29 assists on 48 baskets in this two game slide, a 60.4% assist rate that’s way over the stingy 45-50% mark we’ve accepted as a norm over CTB’s tenure and suggests that the lanes are more open than we’d like.

There’s no guarantee that this is going to change overnight. Guys like Austin Nichols, Mamadi Diakite, and Isaiah Wilkins have the physical skills to be great defenders inside, but Mitchell and Atkins were artists: players who didn’t just run the schemes, but created things defensively when they were on the floor. That’s not something that you can build with Mike Curtis, and I think we’re realizing now how lucky we were to have had those guys in the program.

2.) Ball screens are anathema to our perimeter guys. This is a symptom of poor communication and low awareness. The ease that teams are screening us with this season points to a communication gap between the bigs and the guards. Opponents are using the added daylight to get better looks than they ever have before in the Bennett era: opponents are making 46.8% of their two pointers (115th nationally) and 35.3% from three (217th). The last three seasons? 42.7 and 31.2%, 42.1 and 32.3%, and 40.1 and 30.8%. Better looks = more makes.

3.) There are no A+ defensive rebounders among our current crop of bigs. Part of our defensive rebounding problem is that teams are shooting more threes against us than ever before (38.4% of their shot attempts), and threes create longer caroms that are less predictable and more difficult to chase down. The other, bigger issue is that we don’t have a dynamite defensive rebounder playing big minutes. Akil (who grabbed a quarter of available defensive boards as a junior and 23.5% as a senior) was elite. Darion (19% as a senior) was very good. Our current set of bigs (Isaiah and AG) are OK-but-not-awesome defensive rebounders (16.5 and 16.9%), and while Mike Tobey has always pulled down a great percentage (20.6% this year), we can’t keep him on the floor for myriad other reasons, so his impact there is limited. It’s deflating to the team’s psyche when they play 28 seconds of great defense only to immediately surrender a rebound and layup (or worse, a kick out three).

4.) Sometimes our blockers stop blocking.  The offense that everyone has been raving about has produced 1.04 points per possession in the two losses, which is OK in a vacuum where that number is based on a consistent game-long effort, and not 32 minutes of 0.88 and a furious burst of 1.32. We need to stop hibernating to open games.

The guys need to execute more consistently. Sometimes, the blockers in our blocker/mover simply stop blocking, which means the movers are left to move around aimlessly. Sometimes, the movers — and Malcolm, Darius, and Marial are the biggest offenders here — dribble into a long two point jumper instead of staying within the scheme, leaving the unsuspecting blockers to bunch things up.

5.) None of our role players have reached the point where they can be counted on. Some — Tobey, Nolte — we just know not to expect consistency from. Others — Isaiah, Darius, Marial, Devon, Reuter, Salt — are still technically green enough in college basketball years to still be finding their way. We don’t have anyone outside of Malcolm, Gill, and London that we can expect to bring it on every play, every night, and even Malcolm (against Cal, and in some of his shot choices) and Gill (especially in defense and on the glass) still suffer from alarming lapses in judgement from time to time.

6.) Perhaps the hunters haven’t adjusted to becoming the hunted. If this isn’t the case, then tell me why this group has trailed at the half in four of the last five games, took a pooped on the floor and ate a whole wheel of cheese in the first half in MSG against West Virginia? We’re not starting games with the kind of intensity needed to win them.

So what’s the good news? There’s plenty. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. We still have Tony Bennett, Brad Soderburg, Ron Sanchez, and Jason Williford running the show. The offense has been breathtaking for stretches and has the potential to at least be consistently good. This is the most deep, talented, and versatile team we’ve seen here one through 11, and I’m still high on every single one of them as a potential contributor. The ACC schedule is 18 games long, so there’s time to figure this out, save the season, and do some damage in March.

There is no need to panic, just cause for concern. Take a deep breath, hold it, think about how to proceed, and then let it out on Tuesday in JPJ in the form of the loudest cheers you can muster. They’re going to need them.

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