Three takeaways from Virginia’s collapse against Wake Forest

On a night where Virginia shot 36% from the floor and missed 17 of 23 layup attempts, the Hoos failed to close out visiting Wake Forest. With 10 minutes to play, Virginia led by 7, but crumbled down the stretch and ultimately lost 63-55.

Despite some early miscues, Virginia dominated the majority of the game’s opening 30 minutes. The last 10 were a different story. By the time the game concluded, the last vestiges of good play had flitted away into the rafters at JPJ.

It was a frustrating loss for a team that came into the game with momentum and hope. Now, Virginia will be left to pick up the pieces and try to reassemble them for the next game. Here are three takeaways.

Scoring droughts the killer (again)

Scoring droughts follow Virginia around like mosquitoes do humans on a hot summer day: you don’t always notice the little buggers buzzing around you, but once they bite, their marks are tough to ignore.

So it is with Virginia basketball and scoring droughts. The beginning of the season was plagued by them, but the Hoos seemed to have deployed some pretty effective bug repellent over the last couple weeks. It wore off eventually, and Virginia again fell prey to the horror of the scoring drought. For two separate six-minute stretches, Virginia could not find the net.

Why? It’s tough to say. For one thing, the Hoos lack that player who’s capable of taking the ball in his hands and saying, “dammit, I’m going to score right now.” It’s an intangible quality that the best players possess, and this roster is bereft of it. 

Kihei Clark and Jayden Gardner are the two guys who come closest to that threshold. But Kihei has been reluctant to shoot (and only played 22 minutes against Wake), and Gardner is slumping. Opposing defenses have realized that the pair is Virginia’s best, and are keying on Clark and Gardner more. Still, for Virginia to regain their offensive consistency, those two guys are first going to have to find theirs.

Franklin and Stattmann impressive

A heralded shooter coming out of Indiana, Armaan Franklin has airballed his way to a 22% average from deep in his Virginia career. Virginia fans were just starting to give up on Franklin as a three-point shooter, but out of nowhere he shot his way to 18 points on 3-5 shooting from deep against Wake. 

Franklin is a career streaky player, so it’s dangerous to read too much into one performance. Virginia fans will recall that he went 5-8 from deep against Radford and 4-6 against Providence. Those games were intermixed with misses—lots of them. 

Nevertheless, it is encouraging to see that Franklin has this performance in his bag of tricks. There’s no doubt that more of the same could totally transform this team. 

Draining threes alongside Franklin was Kody Stattmann. At one point, Virginia made four threes in a row, Franklin and Stattmann trading off. 

Stattmann has only taken 27 threes this season (by comparison, Franklin has launched 90), but he’s made them at a good clip. This game brought his season average to 41%. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to see him out there making the net dance. 

What was surprising was what he showed inside the arc. There was the dazzling spin move that earned him two points, and, a few minutes later, a deft Euro step that brought him around a defender for another bucket. One would have been forgiven for pinching themselves to ensure it wasn’t all a dream.

It’s a lot to ask for to hope that Franklin and Stattmann will perform similarly in the future. If they do, however, offensive doors are blasted wide open for this team.

How late is too late?

“Trust in Bennett” is a mantra Virginia fans tend to use whenever the team starts to struggle. And it’s true: Tony Bennett is a fantastic basketball coach who, given time, can turn even the most scraggly group of players into a competitive team.

Time is running out.

By the end of the season, Bennett may very well have Virginia playing strong basketball; with a below-average ACC, the Hoos might even be able to make an ACC tournament run. But March draws ever nearer, and if Virginia is to see their name revealed on Selection Sunday, wins need to start coming. 

The situation begs the question: How late is too late to turn the season around?

Things could click into place in a month, but the season will already have been a lost cause by then (barring the aforementioned possibility of an ACCT run). A switch isn’t going to flip tomorrow, but the stark truth is that Virginia will probably have to win at least 10 of their remaining 13 ACC games to have a tournament-caliber resume.

The next game is a good place to start, and it doesn’t get any easier in this conference than Pittsburgh. A date is scheduled between the Hoos and the Panthers on Wednesday. Then it’s NC State, and then Louisville. Winning all three will be a big ask for this squad, but with a four-game stretch including games against Notre Dame, Miami and Duke coming up after that, it’s probably necessary.

In short: Virginia needs to start winning. Fast.

Image – Virginia Athletics