Tony Bennett’s facial expression more or less says it all. It’s somewhere between a wince and a smile, though closer to the former than the latter, a human recreation of that emoji with the visible teeth: the anxious grimace.
This brief, unmistakable look, given midway through Bennett’s recent ACC media day breakout interview, comes in response to a report from a table just off to his left. According to a reporter, the two forwards at that table, Braxton Key and Mamadi Diakite, have professed a belief that the 2019-20 Virginia Cavaliers will, in fact, be able to shoot the ball roughly as well as the 2018-19 edition — a team that won the national championship in large part thanks to the deadly perimeter shooting efforts of its three since-departed stars.
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“They said that?” Bennett asks. And then comes the facial expression in question, silent but figuratively screaming: Uh, yeah. No.
“Right now we’re not nearly as good of a 3-point shooting team as we were a year ago. No matter what those guys say.”
Can the Cavaliers get there? If not, can they get remotely close? For all of the uncertainties and fresh faces in the latest roster — and there are many of those — this may be the defining analytical quandary of this team: Will Virginia be able to shoot the ball? And what happens if it can’t?
Not long before this exchange in Charlotte last week, when Bennett and his players were seated together at the formal press conference dais, the coach was asked for approximately the 8,764,875th time in his career about how his teams have “been very successful with slowing the game down and keeping the score low.” Which is to say: Virginia’s ephemeral reputation as a joy-destroying, all-defense grindhouse may not have been entirely altered by a) college basketball fans’ increased awareness of tempo-free statistics, b) the events of last season, or c) both. A reminder may be in order. Happy to help!
Last season, believe it or not, Virginia was better on offense than on defense. True story! The Cavaliers finished the season ranked No. 2 in adjusted offensive efficiency, per KenPom.com, which is to say they scored more points per trip up the floor (adjusted for competition) than any team in the sport save Gonzaga. They finished fifth offensively, which, hey, is not too shabby. But UVa’s elite offense was just as responsible — arguably more so — for the thrilling run to a national title. It was that offense that rescued the ‘Hoos in a scary first-round ordeal with Gardner-Webb. It was offense that kept them trading shot after shot with Purdue star Carsen Edwards, whose unconscious Elite Eight performance forced UVa to score 80 points in 62 possessions to reach the Final Four. And it was offense that took UVa over the top in the title game, with 85 points in 77 trips against a Texas Tech defense that was, by far, the nation’s best a season ago. There were crucial defensive outings too — the Final Four game against Auburn, a rock fight in the Sweet 16 against Oregon — but it was Virginia’s ability to put points on the board that raised it above the rest.
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And, yes, much of that ability stemmed from the players Virginia has lost. As associate head coach Jason Williford noted already, De’Andre Hunter, Ty Jerome and Kyle Guy weren’t merely battle-hardened veterans or experienced leaders or the heart and soul of the team. They also represented, individually and as a group, a massive amount of the offensive output.
The inputs were nearly as important. Hunter was a 6-foot-7 athletic outlier equally capable of working in the low block, facing up in midrange and shooting from beyond the arc, where he made 43.8 percent of his attempts. Guy’s constant movement and lightning release made him one of the deadliest spot-up shooters in the country and one of those nightmares no defender wanted to have to deal with. Jerome marshaled the whole thing from the top of the key, an intelligent, angular passer, a savvy pick-and-roll operator and a perimeter player capable of knocking down deep shots off the dribble late in the clock. Together, the three took the vast majority of the attempts from beyond the arc; UVa’s 39.5 percent 3-point shooting was the eighth-best mark in Division I.
Bennett coalesced all of this skill with the introduction of a new offensive system, what he called “flow,” which relied far more on ball screens and spacing than his classic mover-blocker system (or what he calls “sides”). Virginia ran both to great effect last season, peppered with Bennett’s usual (underrated) array of situational quick hitters. Forget the reputation. At its best, Virginia’s offense wasn’t just effective. It was a thing of beauty.
Of course, that reputation doesn’t have zero basis in reality. There have been times in the Bennett-led glory years when Virginia, so devastating defensively, was slightly more plodding on the offensive end. The pre-flow Cavaliers weren’t nearly this efficient in 2017-18, after all, and their lack of a Plan B on offense (and a fast guard to attack the ball defensively, a la Kihei Clark) was the core undoing in the UMBC disaster. That wasn’t a bad offensive team — it ranked sixth in the ACC per trip — but it was hardly a great one. The same was true to an even greater extent in 2016-17, when UVa, blown out by Florida in the second round, boasted the nation’s second-best defense and the ACC’s 11th-best offense. Those teams shot the ball well from beyond the arc, percentage-wise, but attempted far fewer of their shots from there. Virginia has almost never been as bad offensively as the casual score-watcher might assume, but it has not always been the aesthete’s first stop on the dial either.
Is this the scenario that awaits in 2019-20?
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“There is a lot being lost,” Bennett said. “You can’t deny how good Dre and Ty and Kyle were, and (center) Jack Salt. We’ve just got to keep trying to figure out how we can be our best with how we play offensively, defensively. There will be some growing pains. I know that.”
Based on everything coming from Bennett and the players, there is an understanding — at least for the time being — that this team will defend far better than it will score, and not just because Bennett’s brilliant pack-line is one of his program’s stated non-negotiables. It’s also an impression dictated by personnel. Diakite was already a brutal interior defender blocking more than 10 percent of opponents’ shots. Jay Huff, who played far more sporadically, moves well at 7-foot-1 and put up similar block rates when he managed to stay on the court. If he can avoid immediate foul trouble in longer minutes, those two form a formidable rim-protecting core. When Key arrived, he needed time to master the pack-line scheme; with that time under his belt, and his multi-positional versatility, he could become one of Virginia’s most valuable defensive players. Clark was already that at the point of attack a season ago, and everyone raves about freshman guard Casey Morsell’s strength and full-court defensive pressure in practice.
“The defense looks great most of the time,” Diakite said.
The implication there, of course, is that the offense isn’t quite there yet. In particular, the search for shooters is a challenging one. Huff is a major pick-and-pop weapon from beyond the arc, provided he can maintain his percentages with far more touches. Morsell’s perimeter shot is an open question. Clark, by Bennett’s own admission, was a situational shooter, rather than a reliable first option a season ago. His usage rate and shot choices back this up; a significant plurality (39 percent) of his possessions ended with a spot-up shot, usually because the defense had been scurrying around trying and failing to deal with Hunter, Jerome and Guy.
Diakite has, by all accounts, stretched his game, but his track record of 3-point makes (he’s 8-of-28 across three seasons) is not exactly formidable. Diakite’s best offensive work a season ago came almost entirely as the result of movement off the ball. He scored 107 points on 85 “cut” plays last season, and 57 in 40 as the screener in a pick-and-roll. He was far less effective — 38 points in 61 possessions — in conventional post-ups, which are not exactly the most efficient way to put points on the board as it is.
Key attempted just 59 3s last year and made 18.
The great hope is Tony Woldentensae, the first junior college player of Bennett’s UVa tenure, who shot 47 percent from 3 at Indian Hills Community College in Ottumwa, Iowa. But it’s a big leap from Ottumwa to, say Durham or Chapel Hill, let alone Syracuse, where Virginia opens its season on Nov. 5. The junior college coach of the Italian-born guard has admitted that Woldentensae’s defense isn’t remotely near UVa’s standard just yet, and it’s hard to imagine Bennett compromising on that end of the floor — no matter how badly he needs makes on the other. (See also: Huff, Jay.)
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That leaves, at least in the mind’s eye, the image of a tough, hard-nosed, downtempo team willing to grind out defensive possessions and force opponents into late attempts if not shot-clock violations … and one that has nothing remotely approaching the pure offensive certainty it possessed a season ago. Throw in the new 3-point line, which Bennett was preoccupied with, and how stretchy can this offense really be?
“It doesn’t mean we won’t become a good shooting team, and we do have guys that can make 3s,” Bennett said. “But Kyle and Ty, that line didn’t matter; they’d shoot way beyond it. A lot of these guys are right on that line, so as soon as you back it up that changes it. And that’s OK. It just means you have kind of know who you are. Take good shots.”
“We’ll definitely be defense first,” Key said. “We have to be a tough team — last year we were a tough team, but we’re going to have to be tougher this year, losing the offensive pieces we had. You could always rely on Ty going for 20, Dre going for 20, Kyle going for 20. We had guys that could just go off. This year we’re going to have to be a tough team, limit teams to one possession and get back on defense. Our main thing will be defense this year.”
The funny thing about the exchange that induced Bennett into his comical media-day wince is that Key, at least, was mostly joking. (Not positive, but Diakite may have been too, if only because there’s always a reasonable chance that Diakite is joking about something.)
When asked who was going to take over producing all of that lost perimeter offense from a season ago, Key laughed and said, “Um, myself?” Har har, but he’s not not eager to take on a much bigger share of the offensive load, something closer to what he had planned when he was a marquee recruit in the early part of Avery Johnson’s now bygone Alabama tenure, before college flew by. “I’ll get ’em up,” Key said with a laugh. “It’s my last year of college basketball. Oh, they’re going up.”
“Mamadi can shoot them,” Bennett would say later, now also sort of joking. “Braxton can shoot them. The question is: Can they make them?”
If they can’t, Virginia’s chances of matching last season’s sustained offensive brilliance will be nonexistent. For the time being, anyway, UVa will be back to merely getting by. There may be more wincing to come.
(Photo of Braxton Key: Geoff Burke/USA Today Sports)