Hoos See Signs of Progress in Tough Loss

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — The men’s basketball teams from Villanova, Florida, Tennessee, St. John’s and Memphis are a combined 48-8 this season.

Virginia has faced all five of them in non-conference play.

“This team has been tested this season,” UVA interim head coach Ron Sanchez said Wednesday night at John Paul Jones Arena.

The Cavaliers defeated Villanova on Nov. 15. Since then, though, Virginia has lost to the other four, three of which are ranked in the latest Associated Press poll: Tennessee at No. 1, Florida at No. 7, and Memphis at No. 21. (St. John’s was ranked No. 22 when it met UVA.)

“Obviously, it’s been a tough stretch with some super-talented teams that we’ve played,” said swingman Taine Murray, the only senior on Virginia’s roster.

Memphis’ visit to JPJ marked the latest challenge in that grueling stretch. When these programs met a year ago at FedEx Forum, the Tigers routed the Cavaliers 77-54. The rematch was much closer, but Memphis prevailed again, this time by a score of 64-62.

The result disappointed the Wahoos, who fell to 6-5 overall. But their average margin of defeat in their matchups with Tennessee, St. John’s and Florida was 21.7 points, so the Hoos saw encouraging signs, too.

“I think we’re getting better and I think tonight it really showed,” said Murray, who tied his career high with 14 points.

Sanchez said: “I think we battled for 40 minutes, which is a big step for us, trying to get our competitive endurance to increase.”

The Tigers’ goal was to blanket Isaac McKneely, UVA’s top offensive threat, and they succeeded. Still, the Cavaliers never trailed in the first half and went into the break ahead 30-21, and a basket by 6-foot-10 freshman Jacob Cofie on the first possession of the second half stretched their lead to 11.

From there, however, Memphis guard PJ Haggerty was the story of the game. A transfer from Tulsa, Haggerty scored 21 of his game-high 27 points in the second half Wednesday night. For the season, he’s averaging 22.4 points per game.

“He’s obviously really talented, especially when the offense kind of spreads it out and lets him go to work,” Murray said. “His ability to obviously shoot and then kind of put the ball on the floor makes him hard to guard. I think guys did a good job on him, but obviously it’s tough when he gets going like that.”

The Tigers (9-2) broke out a swarming full-court press in the second half, and it had the desired effect. Virginia turned the ball over seven times in the final 20 minutes.

“We can’t have that many self-inflicted wounds,” Sanchez said.

Memphis head coach Penny Hardaway said his team’s press “got us going to where our energy got up and our confidence got up. We had lost confidence a little bit, because it’s hard to score against those guys. Once we started pressuring and getting them to turn the ball over, then we started making some shots.”

The Tigers “can’t press unless they’re scoring,” Murray said, “so eliminating their points in the first half really helped us. We were able to kind of control the game, really, in terms of the pace. But once they started making some 3s and we were taking the ball out in the net, it kind of slows us down and allows them to get in their press.”

Memphis went ahead to stay on a three-point play by guard Tyrese Hunter with 11:57 to play. A pivotal sequence occurred about a minute later. With the Tigers in the bonus, junior forward Elijah Saunders was whistled for a foul on Haggerty, and Ames was assessed a technical.

Haggerty went to the line for four free throws. He made three of them, stretching the Tigers’ lead to 47-39.

“That’s tough when you’re trying to battle back,” Sanchez said.

Memphis went up 55-46 with six minutes remaining, but the Cavaliers didn’t fold. A three-point play by Murray made it 55-49, and then Saunders’ two free throws made it a four-point game at the 4:49 mark.

“We fought to the end of the game,” said Saunders, a transfer from San Diego State who led the Hoos with 15 points.

In the final minute, UVA cut its deficit to three once and to two twice, but the Tigers made enough free throws to secure a second straight win over an ACC opponent. Memphis won at then-No. 16 Clemson on Saturday.

Hardaway, a former NBA star, said he’s watched the Hoos “play over the years and marveled at how they do things. To be able to bring my team in here and get a win is phenomenal.”

The Tigers came in shooting a blistering 44.3 percent from 3-point range, but they were only 5 of 23 (21.8 percent) from beyond the arc against Virginia’s trademark Pack Line defense.

Former UVA head coach Tony Bennett built the program on a foundation of defense, and “we’re gonna keep teaching it and preaching it,” Sanchez said.

Games come down to “winning more possessions than your opponent,” Sanchez said. “Today we won a good amount, but we just didn’t win enough, and that’s the difference. You just gotta win two or three more defensive possessions, and that could have been a defensive rebound, because we gave up a few [offensive rebounds] … That’s what the margin of victory is in most games.”

McKneely, who came in averaging 12.9 points per game, scored only five Wednesday night on 2-for-7 shooting. The Tigers wanted to limit McKneely to five (or fewer) field-goal attempts, “because he’s so deadly,” Hardaway said.

If McKneely figured prominently in Memphis’ scouting report on Virginia, Murray did not. He came in averaging 2.6 points per game and had yet to score in double figures this season. Not long after entering the game, however, he drilled a 3-pointer, and later in the first half he drove and threw down an emphatic dunk that pushed UVA’s lead to 23-14.

“He was damn good tonight,” Hardaway said. “We didn’t talk a lot about Taine Murray at all, and he came in the game and affected the game in a major way … He played like a senior, and he was ready for his moment.”

Murray is from New Zealand, and the crowd at JPJ included his parents, who made the long trip from Auckland to Charlottesville to visit him. They saw their son play the best game of his college career.

“His effort was fantastic,” Sanchez said. “He played with an unbelievable amount of passion on both ends.”

It’s becoming increasingly rare in Division I basketball for a player to stay in the same program for four years, Sanchez noted, and so “to have a fourth-year guy perform that way on this stage who has been waiting his turn to perform, it’s enjoyable for me. I’m really happy for Taine. I think that he just played hard. He wanted to be the hardest-playing guy out there, and the game rewards hard playing. And I think today he was rewarded by doing that.”

Murray and Saunders were the only Cavaliers to score in double figures. Anthony Robinson, a 6-foot-10 redshirt freshman, was pressed into service when Cofie and Blake Buchanan got into foul trouble. He grabbed a team-high six rebounds in a career-best 10:28 off the bench.

“Got some great minutes from Anthony Robinson today,” Sanchez said. “I’m really happy for him. If he continues to come along, then that’ll give us a level of physicality in the interior that we’ve been lacking.”

Robinson didn’t join the program until June 2023, but he’s been on Grounds longer than many of his teammates. Murray joked that at first he didn’t “realize how many new guys we had.”

Their non-conference schedule has tested the Cavaliers, but Murray remains optimistic. “Everyone’s coming together really well,” he said. “I think that we’re building on our relationships that we made in the summer. I think we’re just all growing together.”

THAT’S A WRAP: Virginia, which is 0-1 in the ACC, closes non-conference play Sunday afternoon. At 2 o’clock, in a game to air on ACC Network, UVA hosts American (6-5) at JPJ.

The Eagles also played Wednesday night. American lost 84-57 to Saint Joseph’s in Philadelphia.

Virginia is 5-1 all-time against American. They haven’t met since Dec. 28, 2006, when the Cavaliers, in their first season at JPJ, routed the Eagles 91-70.

UVA’s associate head coach, Jason Williford, is a former American assistant.

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