A furious start to the second half proved fruitless as Virginia was unable to recover from a 20-point halftime deficit at Florida State on Monday. The Hoos were absolutely pummeled in the loss, first by the Seminole big men and then by a barrage of threes that was capped off by seven-footer Balsa Koprivica hitting the first triple of his career.
For Virginia, it was a squandered opportunity to finally pick up a quality win, something they have tried and failed to do multiple times throughout the season.
Their best win is now the 35-point road victory over Clemson, a team that is just 4-4 in ACC play since the defeat to the Wahoos. There is no longer any real defense for Virginia against the critics who say that they have not beaten anybody good.
They were torn apart by Gonzaga, fell apart in the second half against Virginia Tech, and now obliterated by Florida State. Those three games combine to make Virginia 58 points in debt to current top-25 teams.
In short, not good.
The Hoos struggled against Florida State’s physicality, bullied into submission by a team of bigger, stronger, and tougher players. Virginia has been labeled as soft in the past, and they will rightfully receive that distinction again after another timid performance.
But let’s reign in the criticism for a moment and assess the factors that really led to Virginia losing this game.
The refs, while perhaps burned in figurative effigy across social media, were not the problem. They called a relatively fair game, the problem for Virginia being that they let it get more physical than usual.
This instantly tilted the scales toward the hosts, who, as already mentioned, possess a much stronger team. A game in which some contact was permitted was always going to favor the Noles.
That might be partially out of Virginia’s hands, but the Hoos are by no means a small team. They should have been capable of handling Florida State’s size. They’ve struggled against strong big men all season, and this was no exception. Chalk up “get more physical” as an area for improvement between now and March.
Of course, no amount of physicality would have stopped the hail of threes that FSU poured on Virginia. It was superlative shooting, the Noles hitting 13 threes for the first time this season and shooting 54% from beyond the arc.
They hit transition threes, deep threes, and contested threes as easily as one might make a layup. Sure, the Noles got some open looks, but the ridiculous shooting is not a result of bad defense.
The reason that FSU found it so easy to score at times suggests something that we always knew was true. Virginia matches up terribly with Florida State, shorter at every position and unable to contest with the sheer athleticism that Leonard Hamilton recruits so effectively.
In itself, losing to a team because of that is not a bad thing. But look around at the top teams in the nation. They all possess similar lineups, or at least a couple big players who can wreak havoc on Virginia the way Gonzaga and Florida State did.
And Virginia is unable to get their offense started against teams of that stature. Jay Huff and Sam Hauser were rendered nearly ineffective, relegated to just 13 total shots, eight of which came from beyond the arc.
Virginia’s main offensive output came from Kihei Clark, who burst onto the scene for 12 quick second-half points. He single handedly got the Hoos back in the game, scoring in the lane multiple times and finding Hauser for an open three to narrow the deficit to seven.
Those threes were the only other way Virginia managed to put points on the board. They hit nine of them, shooting 39% from deep to keep the score from getting totally out of hand.
The percentages from deep and from the field were respectable, in fact, but Virginia lost the game in other places. They coughed the ball up 13 times and shot a meager 58% from the charity stripe, missing five opportunities there.
In spite of those figures, they rallied to 0.98 points per possession. That’s not going to break any records, but Virginia has won plenty of games without scoring a point per possession and they will win many more. The loss then really goes down to what happened on the other end of the floor, FSU scoring 1.33 PPP on their way to their first 70+ point outing against UVA in 20 games… dating back to when Dave Leitao sat on the Virginia bench.
Aside from the notes about physicality, there are very few aspects of basketball that this game highlighted as concerns. That is both a good and bad thing. Good because it means that Florida State won by grace of an unbelievable performance, bad because accepting a 20-point loss means that Virginia is clearly not at the level their top-10 record suggests.
The poor record against good teams can be rationalized, though. The Gonzaga game was the first against an elite team and Virginia simply wasn’t ready; the Virginia Tech game the Hoos were riding a high and got knocked off that high on the road; and the FSU game was against a team hitting every shot with a home crowd (something Virginia has seen just one time this whole season).
The Hoos are still a good team with plenty of potential upside. But a college basketball pecking order is being established, and Virginia is well short of its top tier.
Image – Virginia Athletics