Seven days and one COVID crisis after defeating Notre Dame, Virginia will return to the court for a home game against Wake Forest. The game was officially confirmed on Sunday, the Hoos retaking the practice court after some staff members tested positive.
Virginia will be missing two unidentified players however, associate head coach Jason Williford divulging this information along with the news that he will not be on the bench for the game. We won’t know who it is that won’t be playing until game time, so we’ll see how much of a factor the missing players are.
The opponent
If the announcers on Sunday night’s Wake Forest-Georgia Tech game are to be believed, head coach Steve Forbes did not have his full team assembled until New Year’s day. While an interesting revelation, this is not much of a surprise given the upheaval that has been present in the Wake Forest basketball program ever since Danny Manning was fired.
Manning was gone at the end of last year, and a week later there were nearly no scholarship players left for Forbes to take over. He relied heavily on transfers and recruiting to even field a team this season, a feat in itself.
Forbes was definitely left with the short end of the stick, and the blame for the impending failure of a season cannot fairly be placed on his shoulders. Wake is in the midst of a major rebuild, and being the first year, this season is going to be a struggle for the Demon Deacons.
Yet Wake started it off well, taking two easy wins from weak opposition. At that time, it may not have looked as if the Deacs would be a good team, but it seemed they would be decent enough to snatch a couple wins off the lower third of the conference.
But then came the bombshell. Routine COVID tests came back positive, cancelling a slew of games and halting the season for about a month. Second and third leading scorers Tariq Ingraham and Ian Dubose were declared out indefinitely, Ingraham to recover from COVID-19 and Dubose due to unspecified medical reasons.
With two of his starting five gone, Forbes turned to an unexpected place for another player, pulling high school senior Carter Whitt up to the big leagues early. A few weeks ago Whitt was preparing for high school basketball; now he’s Wake Forest’s seventh man.
That tidbit does a pretty good job of summing up where the Wake Forest basketball program is right now.
By Forbes’ own admission, Wake is a bad rebounding team and turns the ball over too much, both things that were clear in their 70-54 loss to Georgia Tech. Offensively, they have no identity, though that’s understandable given that they’ve had very little time to play together.
The only player that presents a threat offensively is junior Isaiah Mucius. The 6-foot-8 forward went for 21 points and five boards against the Yellow Jackets, the only bright spot in a Wake Forest offense that is clearly struggling.
Daivien Williamson is also notable, a quick guard who can hit his shot at times but is lacking in all of the other fundamental aspects of his position. If he and Mucius both have career nights Wake might be able to do something offensively, otherwise the Virginia defense should handle everything that comes at them.
And things don’t get much better on the other side of the court. They may not have had much time together, but the fact remains that the Wake defense is truly terrible. The five guys move independently of one another, doing their best individually in a team devoid of chemistry.
Penetrating offensively is going to be effortless for Kihei Clark, Sam Hauser and others, and Virginia should be able to get looks from anywhere on the court against a floundering Wake Forest defense.
What Virginia has to do
It’s one thing to talk about how bad most of the Wake Forest team is, another to go out and pound them the way a top-25 team should. Virginia has to stay focused on the game at hand and simply execute on both sides of the ball the way they did a week ago.
It remains to be seen who will and won’t be playing, but either way the Hoos need to overcome the disadvantage of missing a couple players and focus on what they can control. That starts with shutting down Isaiah Mucius, a task that begins with Jay Huff staying out of foul trouble.
Fouls have plagued Huff throughout his career in Charlottesville, and they’re taking away from the playing time that he deserves. Sam Hauser’s defense is a definite work in progress, which makes it even more important that Huff stays out on the court to handle Mucius.
Otherwise, it’s just more of the same. Virginia just has to play their game and they should be fine.
The prediction
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read what prefaced this, but I’m rolling with the Hoos on their home court. Virginia is better at every position, plays much better defense, and in spite of a couple breaks in play has garnered much more experience than Wake.
With that said, it remains to be seen if any of the key players will have to sit due to COVID exposure. That would obviously influence the game, and could make it a closer affair than it might otherwise be.
But unless the problem is bigger than it has been made out to be, Virginia should have little difficulty picking up a win to start the New Year.
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