BERKELEY, Calif. — The Virginia men’s basketball team opened its West Coast road trip with a 75-61 loss to Cal at Haas Pavilion.
The game started at 11:05 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday and ended two hours and seven minutes later.
The loss was the second straight for the Cavaliers (8-7 overall, 1-3 ACC), who shot only 32.8 percent from the floor. Junior guard Isaac McKneely, who came in as UVA’s leading scorer, missed 7 of 8 shots from the floor and finished with a season-low three points.
Junior forward Elijah Saunders, a transfer from San Diego State, was 1 for 8 from the floor, too, but he made all eight of his free throws. With 11 points and a team-high 10 rebounds, Saunders posted his first double-double as a college player.
Cal is one of the ACC’s three new members, along with Stanford and SMU. The ACC victory was the first for the Golden Bears (8-7, 1-3), whose head coach is former Stanford star Mark Madsen.
The game, which drew a crowd of 3,696, was close for the first 20 minutes Tuesday night. After Cal hit a 3-pointer on the game’s opening possession, Virginia responded with 11 straight points. The Bears answered with a 10-0 run, and the teams traded leads for the rest of the half.
Cal went into the break leading 35-32. UVA held Andrej Stojakovic, the ACC’s second-leading scorer, to four first-half points, but the 6-foot-7 sophomore heated up after intermission. Stojakovic, who transferred from Cal to Stanford after the 2023-24 school year, finished with a game-high 23 points.
The Bears took control in the second half. The Cavaliers committed three fouls and turned the ball over twice in the first 45 seconds of the half, and Cal quickly extended its lead to 43-32.
The fouls mounted for Virginia as the half went on, with the Bears making trip after trip to the line. Cal shot 25 free throws in the second half.
“We just fouled too much,” UVA interim head coach Ron Sanchez told Jimmy Miller on the Virginia Sports Radio Network broadcast.
“We gave them way too much,” Sanchez said. “Our one-on-one stuff was just not good enough: our one-on-one slides, our one-on-one defense, which led to some of the fouls. We gotta be better on the defensive side of the ball.”
In the final seven minutes, UVA twice cut its deficit to nine points, but each time Cal pushed its lead back to double digits.
“Obviously, as a team, we just need to be better on defense collectively,” UVA junior guard Andrew Rohde told Miller. “It’s a lot of mistakes out there. We’re trying to work on that every day and get better, but at some point we gotta be real competitors and just say, ‘They’re not scoring on us.’ We gotta take pride in our one-on-one defense.”
Rohde led the Hoos with 14 points and six assists and had only one turnover. Joining Rohde and Saunders in double figures for Virginia was freshman center Jacob Cofie (12 points). The Cavaliers’ other freshman, guard Ishan Sharma, was 3 for 7 from long range, and sophomore center Blake Buchanan grabbed a game-high five offensive rebounds.
“You could see the improvement in some of the young guys,” Sanchez said.
UP NEXT
Virginia closes its extended road trip Saturday at Maples Pavilion in Palo Alto, Calif. The 4 p.m. (ET) game between UVA and Stanford (10-5, 2-2) will air on ESPNU.
Andrew Rohde (4)