Cavaliers Take Step Back In Loss

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Whatever momentum the University of Virginia men’s basketball team generated early in the week evaporated Saturday night.

The Cavaliers ended a five-game losing streak Tuesday with a one-sided win over Boston College, and with an opportunity to record a second consecutive victory for the first time this month, they appeared to have plenty to play for against Notre Dame at John Paul Jones Arena. But they never led in a 74-59 loss to the Fighting Irish.

Virginia turned in a listless performance. The Irish (9-10 overall, 3-5 ACC) shot 48.2 percent overall and 52.2 percent from 3-point range against UVA’s Pack Line defense. Six Notre Dame players made at least one trey apiece.

“You’re not going to win any game with [the opponent] shooting 52% from 3,” UVA freshman Jacob Cofie said, “and I feel like we just had to do a better job of stopping that.”

Notre Dame scored on seven of its final eight possessions in the first half and led 39-27 at the break. The Irish made three 3-pointers in the first four minutes of the second half to blow the game open.

The Cavaliers are 0-7 this season when they give up 70 or more points. “We scored enough points tonight to win the game,” junior guard Isaac McKneely said. “We just gotta get stuff figured out defensively.”

The Irish came in shooting 36.8 percent from beyond the arc, and their head coach, Micah Shrewsberry, would like his team to put up more 3-pointers. Against UVA, Notre Dame players repeatedly found themselves open on the perimeter, and they capitalized on those opportunities.

Asked about his team’s defensive lapses, Virginia interim head coach Ron Sanchez said, “I always like to say that energy trumps strategy and I’ve got to do a better job of getting the guys revved up, ready to kind of come out and be almost rabid in a way to compete harder. That’s on me. We got to continue to rebound the ball well. Sometimes we do get stops and give up the offensive rebound and that hurts us.”

The Wahoos (9-11, 2-7) gave up 10 offensive boards on a night when Notre Dame outrebounded them 39-27. They struggled at the other end of the court too. Not until the 10:31 mark of the first half did a Cavalier other than McKneely score.

With 8:30 to play, the Hoos had only 36 points and trailed by 27. Virginia hit four 3-pointers in the final 7:06, but by then the outcome had been effectively decided.

The game drew an announced crowd of 14,637, and the home fans left JPJ ruing the Cavaliers’ dispiriting effort. They weren’t the only ones.

“There’s not a single fan out there that wants to win more than I do,” Sanchez said, “and I’m extremely disappointed in the way that the team came out, and that is on me as their head coach, that I did not get them rallied up and ready to compete with their hair on fire like we needed to today. So I’ve got to do a much better job of that.”

The players bore responsibility, too, Cofie said. “I feel like we gotta come out and play as hard as we can every night. I feel like we lacked that today, and we can do a lot better. I think that was on us.”

McKneely kept the Cavaliers connected for a while. After the Irish went up 14-3 on a trey by sophomore point guard Markus Burton, McKneely made back-to-back 3-pointers. After Notre Dame pulled away again, Virginia ran off seven straight points, the last three coming on a McKneely trey that made it 22-18 with 5:50 left in the first half.

At that point, he had 14 points, and that’s what he finished with. McKneely missed his final four shots, all from beyond the arc.

“I’m sure that at halftime [the Irish] went in and said, ‘Man, this kid’s got 14 at half, let’s not let him do that,’ ” Sanchez said. “I think they planned well to make it even harder for him and I think it impacted the quality of shots he got.”

Virginia played without its backup point guard, freshman guard Ishan Sharma, who’s been ill for most of the week. “We missed a lot from him tonight,” McKneely said. “Hopefully we’ll have him back next game.”

Sharma’s absence left the Cavaliers perilously thin in the backcourt, and sophomore guard Dai Dai Ames picked up two early fouls trying to stop Notre Dame’s Markus Burton.

Burton, a sophomore who torched Virginia in South Bend, Ind., last season, finished with a game-high 21 points Saturday to help the Irish make history in a series they trail 18-5. They had been 0-9 against UVA in Charlottesville.

“He can shoot it from the 3, he can get to the mid-range, he can get to the free-throw line as well, so he was a major focus today,” Sanchez said. “We didn’t do the job that we needed to on him. So credit to him for his ability to still perform at that level even though he’s the focus of the scouting report.”

The 6-foot-10 Cofie scored a season-high 17 points, but otherwise there were few highlights for the Cavaliers in this one. The loss dropped them into 16^th place in the 18-team league.

McKneely said he had no explanation for the Hoos’ lack of fire, “but I’m gonna take a lot of responsibility for that. As a leader on this team, I’ve got to make sure that we’re up and ready for each game. We can’t be satisfied with one win against BC. We needed to come in here and get another win, and we just didn’t bring it.”

UP NEXT: Virginia visits Miami (4-16, 0-9), the ACC’s last-place team, on Wednesday at the Watsco Center in Coral Gables, Fla. The 7 p.m. game will air on ESPNU.

The Cavaliers have won seven of their past eight games with the Hurricanes and lead the series 16-13.

Miami lost in overtime at Cal on Saturday night.

The Hurricanes’ interim head coach is Bill Courtney. A former UVA assistant, Courtney was promoted late last month after Jim Larrañaga unexpectedly stepped down as head coach. Larrañaga also is a former Virginia assistant.

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