There was a sense that Virginia’s matchup with Georgia Tech was a potential trap game. Virginia was just five days removed from an exhilarating road victory over seventh-ranked Duke, and was coming home to play floundering Georgia Tech.
That fear was dispelled quickly. Virginia surged to a 22-6 lead, executing beautifully on offense and stifling Georgia Tech on defense.
But in the second half, the trap closed its jaws on Virginia. The Hoos came out of the halftime locker room dampened, and were hit by a 3-minute scoring drought. Georgia Tech steadily whittled away at Virginia’s advantage until the lead was as little as 2 points with just under six minutes remaining.
Over the game’s last few minutes, veterans Kihei Clark and Jayden Gardner took control. The Hoos mopped up the rebellious Yellow Jackets, winning 63-53. Virginia is now 10-5 in the ACC and riding a four-game win streak.
Here are three takeaways.
Virginia’s identity emerges
The first three months of the season saw a struggling Virginia team bumble around without a discernible identity. Over the last four games, an identity has finally emerged.
Part 1: Defense. Defense has been a pillar of Virginia basketball since Tony Bennett arrived in Charlottesville, but Virginia struggled with it for much of this season. The Hoos fell out of the top 100 of the KenPom defensive rankings, but are now back to the 85th spot after a solid outing against Boston College, a great one against Duke, and now a good one against Georgia Tech.
Part 2: Hard work inside the arc. Virginia scored 52 points in the paint in the win over Duke. It only had 20 against Georgia Tech, but outrebounded the Yellow Jackets 32-24. And that second points-in-paint number is slightly deceiving, because Jayden Gardner scored a large part of his 26 points from just a step outside the paint.
Those two pillars—hard work down low and stifling defense—are what this team can now be relied upon to produce every game.
Zone defense is a problem
Coach K switched to a zone on Monday night with Virginia plowing through Duke from inside the arc. An advantage of the zone D, and the main reason why Krzyzewsi elected to deploy it, is that it forces offenses into taking threes. But Virginia refused to settle for deep shots.
Five days later, Josh Pastner ran out a zone and Virginia did the opposite. The Hoos launched 18 threes, three higher than their ACC average of 15 per game. With plenty of time left on the shot clock, they passed up opportunities to look for high-percentage shots and decided to hoist the deep ball.
The results, of course, were unfavorable. Virginia went 4-18 from deep (22%), and shot an even more troubling 39% from the field.
It could be said that a third part of the identity discussed above is an inability to hit threes. Virginia has to recognize—no, embrace—that unfortunate aspect of itself and try to get looks inside over shots from deep.
The ball is still rolling
Poor second half though it may have been, it was enough to get Virginia a fourth consecutive win. That matches Virginia’s lengthiest win streak of the season.
Six teams are jockeying for position atop the ACC. All have 10 wins. Virginia and Wake Forest sit at the bottom of that jumble with five losses, North Carolina and Miami are one notch higher with four losses, and Duke and Notre Dame sit on top with three defeats each.
Virginia would like to break free from the tangle and climb to the top. Barring that, the Hoos would at least like to get inside the top four and earn an ACC Tournament double-bye.
The pursuit of that, and of an NCAA Tournament berth, continues on Monday with a tough road game against a much-improved Virginia Tech team. It’s the second Saturday-Monday turnaround in two weeks for Virginia.
The first one went pretty well.
Image – Virginia Athletics