An unwillingness to try and work the ball inside doomed Virginia to its first ACC loss in 357 days. The Hoos took 54% of their shots from three in the 65-51 loss to Virginia Tech, making less twos (9) than they did threes (10).
The inability to find Huff or Hauser in the post or midrange caused an over-reliance on the three ball, leading to a seven-minute scoring drought when Virginia finally went cold from three.
Yet neither player even took advantage of the few opportunities that presented themselves. Huff scored one post bucket all night, and Hauser made some inexplicable decisions to pass out of good situations.
The most glaring of these was when the senior forward failed to take advantage of a mismatch with Jalen Cone. Cone gives up nine inches to Hauser, so when the latter found himself backing up the former 10 feet from the basket he naturally should have scored an easy bucket.
Alas, Hauser tossed the ball back out to the perimeter, a place where it spent the vast majority of its time when Virginia was on offense. Virginia may have shot it well from deep in the first half, but when the supply of threes dried up in the second the Hoos were left desperately floundering for points.
This dependence on the three is part of a recent trend, and the ongoing problem hit its low point in the loss to the Hokies. Virginia has simply not been capable of maneuvering the ball inside the three-point line the way they need to be.
A game against the toughest foe since Gonzaga was not exactly the ideal time for this problem to crop up again. Virginia’s recent dominant performances led us to believe that past problems had been remedied, but this game showed us that might not entirely be the case.
That being said, nothing went in Virginia’s favor on Saturday night in Blacksburg. When the whistle is blown against one team a mere eight times and against the other team double that number, it’s always going to tilt the balance. But when the calls are for such trivial, sometimes nonexistent infractions, another issue arises. Guys become unlikely to get physical on either side of the court, scared that they’ll hear the shrill screech of wind blowing through a whistle.
Aside from the foul disparity, the other statistic to illustrate the one-sidedness of the officiating is that Virginia did not shoot a free throw for the first 30:05 of the game. They had exactly four attempts at the charity stripe all night, 10 less than Virginia Tech. The lack of free throws, however, can be attributed not only to bad officiating but also to the absence of drives to the basket.
The Hokies also caught fire from three in the second half. Keve Aluma’s 29 points kept them on level terms for much of the first and the beginning of the second, but the rest of the Hokies drilled three after three to take and then stretch their lead.
Huff did a poor job defending Aluma, and Virginia had a lackluster defensive outing on the whole. They managed to make a good ACC player look like an all-time great as they could find no answer to Aluma’s dominance.
Yet despite Virginia’s seemingly weak defensive performance, they still managed to hold the Hokies to a respectable 65 points. Virginia should be eclipsing that number on offense every game, so make no mistake: the inability to score, not the defense, was the primary cause of the loss.
Virginia wasted trip after trip down the floor by taking ill-advised threes when they could have taken it inside. Practice this week will no doubt center around finding ways to score when the Hoos run dry from three.
It’s not a terrible thing to have a reality check like this every once in a while, though it does sting to fall to the Hokies in such blowout fashion. Hopefully Tony Bennett can use this as a learning experience to improve his perpetually-growing team.
The chance to extend the ACC lead to two games may have been squandered, but the issues have now been exposed and Virginia can get to work on correcting them.
Image – Virginia Athletics
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