Hoos Come Away From Loss With Work to Do

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This has not been a memorable season for ACC men’s basketball, but the league’s top team, Duke, is ranked No. 3 nationally and has more than enough talent to win an NCAA title.

The Blue Devils came to town Monday night for their first game at John Paul Jones Arena in two years. Virginia, seeking its fourth straight win, stayed connected for the first seven minutes, but the Devils eventually overwhelmed their opponent with their size, length, athleticism and shooting prowess.

Such outcomes have been common for Duke this season. The Devils were coming off a 36-point win over Stanford, a team that defeated UVA 88-65 last month. The final at JPJ was 80-62.

“Give Duke a lot of credit,” said Ron Sanchez, UVA’s interim head coach. “They played hard. They didn’t take any possessions off.”

Duke’s starters stand 7-foot-2, 6-foot-9, 6-foot-7, 6-foot-6 and 6-foot-6, respectively. “They’ve got length at a lot of positions,” Sanchez said, “and those guys also have a lot of skills.”

On the rare occasions that the Devils (23-3 overall, 15-1 ACC) missed shots in the first half, they usually came up with an offensive rebound. Nearly nine minutes elapsed on the scoreboard clock before the Wahoos (13-13, 6-9) grabbed their first rebound.

The final rebounding numbers underscored Duke’s dominance on the background. The Devils finished with 41 boards, to 21 for UVA.

“The first half, they really just made a statement on the glass,” Sanchez said.

The Devils totaled 14 second-chance points in the first half and, perhaps not coincidentally, led by 14 at the break. Duke forward Cooper Flagg, a 6-foot-9 freshman who’s projected to be the No. 1 pick in the next NBA draft, had 11 rebounds in the first half, to eight for the Cavaliers.

“It’s a team effort,” said UVA guard Isaac McKneely, a 6-foot-4 junior, “it’s not just one person. All five of us gotta rebound. So that’s something we can definitely improve going forward.”

Rebounding has been a weakness this season for UVA, and the coaching staff “knew we had some disadvantages on the glass [coming into Monday], but we felt we would do a much better job than we did,” Sanchez said. “That was unacceptable. Our interior players have to do a much better job rebounding the basketball.”

Virginia’s post players—starters Blake Buchanan and Jacob Cofie and reserves Elijah Saunders and Anthony Robinson—combined for nine rebounds. Flagg collected 14 himself, and 6-foot-7 guard Kon Knueppel, a former UVA recruiting target, had seven.

“To me, I think the big thing was the rebounding,” Duke head coach Jon Scheyer said.

The Hoos shot well early in the game—they took a 12-11 lead on sophomore guard Dai Dai Ames’ jumper—but finished at 38.5 percent from the floor. Virginia missed multiple contested shots in the paint.

“It’s really hard to get what we want versus teams like that,” junior guard Andrew Rohde said.

Even so, the Cavaliers’ starting guards found ways to score. Ames and Rohde finished with 15 points apiece, and McKneely added 14. McKneely, Virginia’s leading scorer this season, hit 4 of 7 shots from 3-point range.

“I could not have asked more from Andrew, from Dai Dai or from iMac,” Sanchez said. “I think those three guys showed up and they met the challenge. They played well, and we just didn’t get what we needed from other positions.”

Five regular-season games remain for the Hoos, who are 12^th in the ACC. In the latest Associated Press poll, Florida, Duke, Tennessee, St. John’s, Memphis and Louisville are Nos. 2, 3, 6, 10, 22 and 25, respectively. The Cavaliers have faced (and lost to) all of those teams, and they’ll host No. 18 Clemson on March 1 at JPJ.

“Our schedule has not been forgiving at all,” Sanchez said.

Virginia lost 73-48 to Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium last season and bounced back from that defeat to win its next two games. Sanchez said Monday night that “messaging is important. The power of the tongue is what you need in this space, and I’ve got to make sure that I deliver the right message to the guys, which is: We are playing good basketball.

“We did not play our best basketball tonight. That does not take away from the good basketball that we are playing. We have to understand that. We have to recognize the things that we did well, celebrate those, identify the things that we did poorly and attack those immediately so we can prepare for the next opponent coming up and then move forward. Our journey was not about beating Duke. Our journey is about being the best team that we can be. Duke was just the next opponent on the schedule. So this is one game and we just have to move forward.”

The Blue Devils outscored the Cavaliers 42-18 in the paint. Flagg was 0 for 3 from long range, but he made 8 of 13 shots from inside the arc and finished with 17 points. He also had two assists, two blocked shots and two steals.

“He’s a good player, and he’s gonna score,” Sanchez said. “I’m not sure that there’s a [defender] in college basketball that can tell him that he’s not gonna put the ball in the basket. We just wanted to make it as difficult as we could. And when you’re the front-runner on the scouting report and you can still go out there and produce every night like he does, then that’s credit to his talent.

“But again, back to us, it was the glass. I think the glass was the deciding factor here today as far as our quality of play.”

Of the Cavaliers’ post players, Robinson acquitted himself best. Early in the second half, the 6-foot-10, 250-pound redshirt freshman blocked a dunk attempt by Flagg, and he finished with seven points and three rebounds in 18:50 off the bench.

Robinson was coming off a career game—15 points and nine boards—in UVA’s win over Virginia Tech in Blacksburg on Saturday afternoon.

“Anthony’s improving,” Sanchez said. “You saw his energizing plays in the second half [against Duke]. We needed more of that. And he’s big, he’s strong. Anthony’s shortcoming right now is that he’s young, and you can’t speed up Mother Nature. He’s learning to be an impactful defender. We had a couple of miscommunications when he was on the floor. That’s the times the game is a little too fast for him, but he is improving.

“He’s getting better. It’s a great opportunity for him today. I know he wasn’t fantastic, but he definitely helped the cause.”

Rohde led Virginia with five assists. For the first time since Jan. 25, the Hoos finished with fewer than 73 points, but offense wasn’t their downfall Monday night. Ames, a transfer from Kansas State, scored in double figures for the fifth straight game, and Rohde and McKneely continue to play well, too.

“Andrew’s a big part of that,” McKneely said. “He’s been dishing the ball really well these past few games. He’s been a leader on our offense. When he’s dishing the rock out like that, we’re really tough to stop. But I think we’re just playing free, Coach Sanchez is letting us play a little bit. The bigs are doing a great job screening. We’ve been making shots for the most part recently. But we’ve got to find ways to get stops, because I think we scored enough points to win a game. We just got to find a way to get stops.”

The loss stung, but Rohde said he and his teammates “can’t hang our heads. We can’t do anything about what happened tonight besides look back at the film and try to get better in certain aspects. And I’m really excited. We’ve got a good stretch ahead of us just to keep playing basketball.”

UP NEXT: UVA faces another longtime rival Saturday, this time on the road. At 4 p.m., in a game to air on ESPN2, Virginia meets North Carolina (15-11, 8-6) at the Dean E. Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C.

The Cavaliers have won nine of their past 13 meetings with the Tar Heels in a series that started in February 1911.

UNC hosts NC State at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

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