Hoos Limp Home from Taxing Trip

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

DALLAS — For stretches Saturday afternoon at Moody Coliseum, Virginia played the brand of basketball associated with the program for the past 15 years. The Cavaliers held ACC newcomer SMU scoreless for the final 4:25 of the first half and the first 4:04 of the second.

“We got on the floor, we dove, we did some things that resemble us a lot more today than we have [recently],” interim head coach Ron Sanchez said. “And that’s the encouraging piece.”

The discouraging piece for the Wahoos was their performance over the final 10 minutes of their ACC opener. After junior guard Isaac McKneely’s fourth 3-pointer pushed UVA’s lead to seven with 10:19 to play, SMU called a timeout. Once play resumed, the Mustangs gathered momentum, and the Hoos unraveled. UVA scored only six points the rest of the way—all on free throws—and lost 63-51 to an SMU team playing its first-ever ACC game.

“When we’re up seven late in the game, we’ve got to find a way to close it out and get a win,” said McKneely, who with 17 points was the only Cavalier to score in double figures.

With 6:24 remaining, sophomore center Blake Buchanan hit both ends of a one-and-one to give UVA a 47-44 lead. That was the Hoos’ last lead. Back-to-back 3-pointers by senior guard Kario Oquendo, who came in shooting 51.6 percent from beyond the arc, put SMU (8-2, 1-0) ahead to stay.

The rest of the Mustangs were a combined 4 for 18 from 3-point range, but Oquendo (game-high 21 points) was 4 for 6. He had open looks on most of his attempts. Oquendo figured prominently in UVA’s scouting report on SMU, but “we lost him a few times and he had some timely shots,” McKneely said.

The Cavaliers (5-4, 0-1) had other problems. They committed six turnovers in the final eight minutes, and SMU pounced on their mistakes.

“I think some of our youth and inexperience showed down that stretch,” Sanchez said.

It was still a five-point game when McKneely passed to 6-foot-10 freshman Jacob Cofie cutting to the basket with about 3:30 to play. The sequence that followed typified the Hoos’ late-game woes. Cofie caught the ball and soared for what would have been an emphatic dunk, but his attempt ricocheted off the rim, and SMU grabbed the rebound.

“Just got a little excited in the moment,” Cofie said.

So it went for the Hoos in the final minutes Saturday as they dropped their ACC opener for the first time since the 2007-08 season.

As the game tightened, Sanchez said, the Mustangs started “denying iMac the ball, really jumping and forcing other guys to make plays, which today was a little bit of a challenge, honestly.”

One of Virginia’s starters, sophomore guard Dai Dai Ames, played only seven minutes in the first half before leaving with an ankle injury. He didn’t return. Another starter, junior forward Elijah Saunders, was in foul trouble for most of the game and went 0 for 6 from the floor.

Even so, UVA, which lost 87-69 at No. 13 Florida on Wednesday night, had a chance to end an extended road trip on a positive note. After falling behind by nine points late in the first half Saturday in front of a crowd that included former President George W. Bush (whose brother Marvin is a UVA alum), the Cavaliers had steadied themselves and taken control of the game.

“To be in that position was really energizing for us,” Sanchez said. “I was really enthused. I thought that resembled more of a Virginia basketball type of game. I think that we were playing the right way, doing certain things. Having two starters out kind of made it a little more challenging, and we had to depend on a couple of young guys.”

One of those young guys was Cofie, who finished with eight points in 24-plus minutes off the bench. Another was his classmate, Ishan Sharma, a 6-foot-5 guard whose role grew in Ames’ absence.

Sharma contributed three points, four rebounds and one assist, with one turnover in 15-plus minutes.

“I think his experience today hopefully will help him later,” Sanchez said. “We’re encouraged by him. He was thrust into the position today, and I think he did a really good job defensively as well.”

Sharma “runs point guard with the second group in practice,” McKneely said, “so he’s pretty comfortable doing that. And he’s a big-time player. He hasn’t had too much of a chance to show it yet, but I think he’s gonna be special.”

McKneely (13.6 ppg) has been the only consistent scoring threat for the Cavaliers this season, and that’s made defending them easier for opponents. The 6-foot-8 Saunders (9.4 ppg) is capable of breakout games—he scored a career-high 19 points against Florida—but consistency has eluded the transfer from San Diego State.

Like Saunders, Ames (Kansas State) is a transfer who’s in his first season at UVA. Ames’ emergence as an offensive threat has been an encouraging development for the Cavaliers, but when No. 7 is unavailable, as was the case for most of the game Saturday, the pressure on McKneely grows that much greater.

McKneely isn’t shying away from that responsibility.

“I knew coming into the year I was gonna have to be the leader on this team and do a lot of scoring,” McKneely said. “But that’s how I want it. I want it that way, and hopefully I can continue to score.”

Turnovers again were a problem for Virginia, which finished with 14 against SMU. The Cavaliers have had at least 14 turnovers in each of their four losses, three of which were to ranked opponents (Tennessee, St. John’s and Florida).

Too often, McKneely said, the Hoos get sped up and then make poor decisions with the ball. “Especially when we’re up seven,” he said, “there’s no sense in playing super-fast. We should start trying to wind it down a little bit, run some clock. But I think sometimes, myself included, we rushed and made some bad passes down the stretch [against SMU].”

This was only the second time these programs have met. Their first clash was in November 2013, when the Hoos edged the Mustangs 76-73 in the semifinals of the Corpus Christi Challenge in Texas.

SMU is one of the three schools that joined the ACC this year, along with California and Stanford. Virginia won’t face any of them at John Paul Jones Arena this season. The Cavaliers’ schedule includes games at Cal (Jan. 8) and Stanford (Jan. 11). The game in Berkeley, Calif., will start at 11 p.m. Eastern.

“I will tell you when we take that [West Coast] trip what that’s like,” said Sanchez, who was promoted from associate head coach when Tony Bennett unexpectedly retired in October.

Sanchez smiled. “I don’t know what we did wrong to have to go on the road [for] all three of these games. I thought that Coach Bennett had a little more respect in the league, but we’re going to figure it out when we get there … It’s gonna be a long trip, but it’s part of the journey.”

The journey so far has tested the Cavaliers, whose lone senior is Taine Murray. Each of Virginia’s defeats has been by at least 12 points.

“Losing sucks, for sure,” McKneely said, “but my job on this team is to be a leader and keep these guys together. And I just told them after the game that it’s a long season, and it’s just our first ACC game. We’ve still got 19 left. Obviously, we haven’t had a good stretch here recently, but I’m excited to see where this team can go. I think we’re taking steps.”

So does Cofie. “I feel like we’re playing more of the Virginia brand of basketball,” he said. “We’re getting better every game, and I feel like we’ll just learn and go back to the drawing board and keep fixing this.”

For an inexperienced team still trying to forge an identity, “a lot of things come into play,” Sanchez said. The Cavaliers left Charlottesville on Tuesday afternoon and didn’t get home until Saturday night, and the trip took a toll on the players.

Still, Sanchez said Saturday, Virginia had “some really, really good stretches of basketball today.”

In holding SMU without a point for more than eight minutes, the Hoos “were connected,” Sanchez said. “We were covering for one another. Our ball-screen defense was better. We didn’t get stretched, we contested shots, we stayed down on shot fakes. We did all the little things well, and then that allowed us to kind of absorb the run that they went on, and then we shut them down and then we made our run. Unfortunately, we couldn’t capitalize on that in the second half.”

UP NEXT: Final exams start Monday at the University. Thursday is a reading day, and UVA will host Bethune-Cookman (2-6) at John Paul Jones Arena that night. The 7 p.m. game will air on ACC Network.

The Hoos are 1-0 all-time against the Wildcats. They met on Dec. 8, 1994, at University Hall, where Virginia routed Bethune-Cookman 109-49.

Two of UVA’s current staffers played in that game. Associate head coach Jason Williford started against Bethune-Cookman and contributed two points, eight rebounds and five assists in his 16 minutes.

Strength and conditioning coach Mike Curtis came off the bench and scored four points and grabbed three boards in his six minutes.

To receive Jeff White’s articles by email, click the appropriate box in this link to subscribe.