Every year, in the weeks following the conclusion of UVA’s basketball season, I like to do a retrospective, hash out my feelings, do a little introspection on the trends I’m seeing from the program, and look ahead at what’s next for the Hoos. Lord knows it’s never a boring March and April. This year I’m breaking it up into three installments, focusing first on the positives from this past season, second on the struggles, and third on the path ahead. This is Part Two. 

In Part One, I cautioned folks against being too negative about the season just completed. Yes, an NIT season was a step back from the level of success to which we’ve become accustomed, but it still wasn’t a bad season by all accounts, just a mediocre one. And as we saw with other top programs like Michigan State, Kentucky, UNC, and even Duke, it’s not unheard of to just not have the pieces come together some years, even for the most elite of programs. One down-ish year does not justify unmitigated pessimism, and in fact there were a lot of things about this just-completed NIT run worth enjoying and celebrating.

With that said, we also acknowledged that for this past season to be go down in this history books as only an aberration, it requires the program to promptly bounce back. And yes, it’s easy to simply wave your hand and say “Tony Bennett,” and assume that’s all there is to being back on top in a season. If that’s your boat, that’s awesome. But I’ve never been shy about taking the time to look under the hood at the program’s sausage-making (too many disparate analogies? Nah!), and evaluate from year to year what needs to be revectored to keep the Hoos back on top of the ACC and contending for Top 10 and Final Four finishes.

But before we can really look ahead at next season and beyond to get a feel for what may or may not be needed to get back on track, let’s look back at this past season and the seasons leading up to it to talk about what got us here. The title of this article asks what went “wrong,” and I put that word in quotes because it’s a loaded word that may put some folks on the defensive. Maybe the better way to ask the question is what didn’t go right, or what wasn’t up to our usual standards?

Either way, I want to break it down into four key talking points, some of which feed into others, which will be my topic for this second piece in the series. We’ll talk resolving these issues to shore up our long term prospects in Part 3.

So let’s dive right in. What held us back this year from being even simply on the right side of the Bubble?

1) Not Enough Shooting.

This is the low hanging fruit, so let’s just get it out of the way. UVA shot 32.3% collectively from behind the 3-point-line this season, a rate that ranked 247th nationally. It stayed steady in ACC play, 32.1%, which was 13th in the league. Yes, it’s better than the 30.3% the offensively challenged 2019-20 UVA team logged, but I’d rather compare it to last season’s 37.5%, or the four seasons leading into the title which saw us shoot 40.2%, 38.5%, 38.3%, and 39.5% from behind the arc.

It was so bad that UVA built its entire offense around avoiding having to take 3’s. Less than a quarter of our field goal attempts were from behind the arc, one of the lowest rates in the country. There was little confidence, nor little action to get our team repeated opportunities to knock them down. It was to the point that guys repeatedly passed up on open looks, even our starting guards for whom that should be right in their wheelhouse.

Of course missing 3’s is bad. But not being a threat means defenses can sag off shooters, give more help to the paint, and clog up driving lanes or interior passing lanes more effectively. It’s a compounding negative effect on the offense, and the biggest reason the Hoos’ offense finished 85th nationally and 8th in the ACC in KenPom’s efficiency metrics. It’s a credit to our interior finishing that the cumulative effect on the offense wasn’t as bad as it was in 2020 when our shooting was equally struggling; that year the offense was the league’s 2nd-worst. But the bottom line is that shooting that inconsistently puts a hard cap on how good your offense can be, meaning it’s not the kind of offense that’s going to win you games when the other team just gets hot.

So why was it so bad? Let’s start in the frontcourt, where there was no pick-and-pop threat like Jay Huff or Mamadi Diakite at the 5, nor perimeter-oriented combo forwards like Braxton Key, De’Andre Hunter, Sam Hauser, or Trey Murphy to play the 4. Kody Stattmann was the closest to fit that description, but he only really played maybe 8-ish minutes a game in that frontcourt, Jayden Gardner playing over 30 mpg at the 4-spot alone, and Kody instead used primarily as a big 3.

Now, the early Peak Bennett teams had similar frontcourts, you’ll counter. And that’s right. The rotations of Tobey/Gill/Mitchell/Atkins/Wilkins/Salt between the 2014 and 2017 seasons were never stretching defenses the way we saw from the last couple rosters (which effectively started when Tony finally started playing “small” in 2018 with De’Andre Hunter at the 4) and those teams all did pretty well.

Well, yeah, because they had a seemingly unending string of good shooting backcourts that saw snipers in basically every lineup at the 1, 2, and 3 positions. Harris, Brogdon, Perrantes, Anderson, Hall, Thompson, Shayok, Jerome, Guy… all guards who could be at a minimum 35%+, often 40%+, shooting from deep. It put points on the board and it kept defenses stretched.

This year’s backcourt was basically just Reece, Kihei, Armaan, and Kody. Given how little we saw reserves like McCorkle or Murray, it’s not even useful to factor them into this discussion, not yet anyways.

Those four main rotation guards and wings had 3P%’s of 34%, 35%, 30%, and 34% respectively on the year. To a large degree, we saw this coming. Kihei shot only 32% from 3 last year. Reece only 24% as a freshman. Kody had never had a year better than 27% from deep.

So what exactly was our gameplan going into the year? It was a threefold plan/prayer.

A) A lot rode on Armaan Franklin duplicating the 40% 3P-shooting he put up as a sophomore at Indiana. That was derailed by struggling to adapt quickly to UVA’s systems and battling turf toe throughout the year, possibly further compounded by some shot mechanics that needed fixing.

B) The second piece was an expectation that a TON of offseason work by Kihei and Reece would materialize on the court. Well, each did improve upon his numbers from the season prior, but it obviously wasn’t enough.

C) Lastly, the UVA staff had to hope that at least one or two of the “3M’s”, the young trio of McCorkle, Murray, and Milicic would prove ready enough to take on a big reserve role in the offense, but we saw how quickly that hope fizzled as none found place in the rotation come ACC play.

With all three of those aspects failing to come together, UVA’s perimeter offense was doomed, and with it our hope for a strong offensive season was not to be. Which was a huge shame, because while at least the 2019-20 team’s bad offense could at least be salvaged by a vintage UVA suffocating defense, this team, not so much. And while I could just say “the defense regressed,” as another factor for the season’s results, I’ll take it one step further and actually say why that was.

2) Too much roster turnover in one offseason.

UVA’s culture of defense is part scheme, part hustle, part talent. But it’s also part experience. Starting with UVA’s first NCAAT season under Bennett in 2011-12, the Hoos went nine straight seasons with a Top 25 season per KenPom’s defensive efficiency metrics, meaning we weren’t just elite from a PPG allowed perspective, but per possession. Eight of those seasons UVA finished in the Top 10 of D-1.

The key with all of those seasons was that UVA was returning system vets at a number of key positions, guys who’d not simply just been on UVA’s roster the season before, but played a major role in the rotation.

That’s not to say those UVA teams didn’t have new faces, or even just younger guys taking on bigger roles. But for a lot of those teams, the main rotation rarely featured more than maybe 1 new face as a starter and another coming off the bench. For instance, the breakthrough 2013-14 team was primarily returners except for London Perrantes starting at the 1 and Anthony Gill coming off the bench at the 4. The ACC Championship 2018 team saw grad transfer Nigel Johnson off the bench at point and RS Freshman De’Andre Hunter debuting off the bench at the 4. The National Title team had rookie Kihei Clark at point and transfer Braxton Key off the bench at the 4. Every other key player on those rosters was a returning face.

Overall, there’s a pretty clear correlation between percentage of the rotation returning from the season prior (quantified as “% Minutes Returning”) and the ensuing seasons defensive rating (AdjD per KenPom). I.e. – more roster continuity generally equals better defensive performance. Here it is in graphical form from 2011-2022.

There are two outliers in this set. First is 2016, when despite a ton of experience (Malcolm, Gill, Tobey, Perrantes all on the back end of their careers), the team played like an NBA club waiting for the playoffs, sleepwalking through large parts of the regular season before flipping a switch to make a deep run in both the ACCT and NCAAT. Even then that defense still ranked Top 10 nationally, it was just down a peg from usual sub-90 ratings. The other outlier is the 2020 team, where despite the exodus of Salt, Guy, Jerome, and Hunter that previous offseason, the returning core or Kihei, Braxton, Huff, and Mamadi were able to provide enough high-level defense (that veteran frontcourt swatted everything) to integrate a few new faces at guard and wing.

But sometimes in statistics, it’s helpful to throw out the outliers on each end and see what the data looks like without them, and here we see that trend line we talked about even more pronounced:

So I think we can confidently talk about the importance of roster continuity on defensive performance.

Looking back the last couple of seasons, UVA’s internal development pipeline strategy hit a snag starting with the mass exodus of stars following the 2019 title, and UVA was forced to plug in three new faces into its backcourt in Casey Morsell, Tomas Woldetensae, and an essentially-debuting Kody Stattmann. Still, with Kihei Clark back at the point and a trio of incredible defenders returning 3-5 in Key, Diakite, and Huff, UVA’s defense was able to stay elite.

But the cracks started to show last year, the 2021 season. We debuted two transfers at the 3 and 4 in Hauser and Murphy along with a rookie Beekman in the backcourt, leading UVA’s defense to regress and finish a still good but not elite 36th nationally. Our inverted 5-out offense, the elite big man shooting, was what carried us to the ACC title, not our vaunted Pack Line.

This year, the wheels truly came off by our standards; look at 2022 sitting at the top left of those graphs, so little continuity leading to our worst defense in a decade. Again with a few too many holes to patch on short notice, UVA had two new transfers starting at the 3 and 4 in Gardner and Franklin. And at the center spot, we rotated two very green returners in Caffaro and Shedrick, the pair having combined for only 353 career minutes played at UVA coming into the season. That was effectively 4/7ths of our rotation never having played regular Pack Line minutes before this year, encompassing our entire back line. Asking any of the 3Ms to join that defensive inexperience was a mess every time it was tried.

It meant that UVA’s three system-experienced guards (Clark, Beekman, and Stattmann) weren’t enough; the interior of the defense was way too disorganized, especially early in the year. And the extra help required to try and defend the paint meant less pressure on the perimeter and more open 3-point shots for the opponents.

UVA finished with a mediocre performance in basically every defensive statistical category. 8th in the league in 3P% defense (36.4%), 7th in 2P% defense (49.9%), 11th in defensive rebounding (28.9% OR% allowed), and 7th in FT Rate (24.9% FTA/FGA). We’re rarely a big turnover-producing defense, so I’m not focused there, and certainly Reece’s pick pocketing was nice. And the block rate was solid, 3rd best in the ACC at 12.7% mostly thanks to Kadin’s big year, though of course his block-hunting came with the team’s worst individual foul rate.

All in all, though, it was a very down year for our defense, the worst since Tony’s 2nd year here, and at the end of the day that comes down to having just too many fresh faces in a system that thrives on continuity and experience.

So how did we get to a point where we’re just continually having more rotational spots to fill than we could smoothly handle from last season to this season?

3) Too many recruiting misses.

UVA got where it got between 2014 and 2019 because it developed good high school prospects into multi-year rotation contributors at a very high clip, many of whom earned spots on All-ACC lists at the end of various seasons. The breakthrough ACC seasons of 2014-2019 (four regular season ACC titles, two ACC tournament titles, six NCAA Tournament berths, four 1-seeds, a 2-seed, three Sweet 16s, and a natty) were built upon the backs of players Tony recruited in the 2010-2016 high school classes; those rosters usually featured only 1 transfer player in the main rotation (2015-16 being the exception with both Anthony Gill and Darius Thompson, though of course Gill was in his fourth year at UVA by that point).

What that means is we owe our success in those classes to Tony Bennett’s incredible high school scouting, recruiting, and then subsequent retention and development. Let’s look at those players signed out of HS in those classes and run the numbers:

*Green: All-ACC performer** / Yellow: Multi-year rotational contributor / Red: Left before cracking the main rotation.

**For my analysis, I just ask if a guy made one official ACC year-end spot during his tenure, whether one of the 1st/2nd/3rd/HM/Defensive Teams, DPOY, or 6MOY.

Those numbers total as follows:

Signees: 26
Signees/Year: 3.7
All-ACC Contributors: 14 (53.8%)
Rotation Contributors: 3 (11.5%)
Non-Contributors: 9 (34.6%)

If you want to exclude the 2010 class (the “Six-Shooters” as they when then called, whom Tony recruited when only having been on Grounds for a few months) and look only at 2011-2016, the hit rate looks even better:

Signees: 20
Signees/Year: 3.3
All-ACC Contributors: 12 (60%)
Rotation Contributors: 3 (15%)
Non-Contributors: 5 (25%)

Now let’s look at the five classes since then, starting with the 2017 group and running through the 2021 class.

Obviously some upside is left TBD for those still hanging around, we may yet see Kadin or even Taine (who I’ve greyed out as TBD for now) break through to a new tier. But let’s try and peg it somewhere in the middle to be conservative. As of today, the equivalent breakdown looks to be as follows:

Signees: 13
Signees/Year 2.6
All-ACC Contributors: 2 (15.4%)
Rotation Contributors: 4 (30.8%)
Non-Contributor: 6 (46.2%)
TBD: 1 (7.7%)

Even if we see Taine and Kadin turn out to be top guys (and odds say that’ll be maybe 50/50), the distribution of Hit/Miss is still noticeably lower over the last five year than it was over the six or seven season prior. We’re bringing in fewer guys out of the gate, and even then the guys we are getting are washing out of the program before ever contributing on the floor at a markedly higher rate. Whereas over those early classes we could count on at least one, maybe two future all-ACC guys in any given class, lately we’re lucky if we get one in every other class.

I’m not going to deep dive the “why’s” today, and I do acknowledge that it’s silly to look at any one player too closely because everyone’s circumstances (hit or miss) are different. What matters is the aggregate level of success, and for today’s purpose of looking at how UVA as a program regressed to being an NIT club that loses to Navy and JMU, it would be silly to overlook the impacts of high school recruiting. When it works, we win a lot. When it doesn’t, we struggle to keep up.

Yes, transfers can help, as we saw with Key, Woldetensae, Hauser, Murphy, Gardner, and Franklin; transfers are taking on a new larger role each year the last three seasons. But they can’t be the entire answer. You need that roster continuity to maintain culture, develop team leaders, and deploy a lineup competent and smooth in the offensive and defensive systems. And that doesn’t happen without a pipeline of guys developed internally, as we talked about in #2.

This was just one of those years where a lack of year-to-year roster continuity and system familiarization caught up with us, and that’s in large part due to a drop-off in our recruiting hit rate over the last five classes.

Now, let’s break those recruiting classes into three distinct groups.

• The first was the 2017 and 2018 classes, which if you want to be generous can be explained away as a lot of top recruits not wanting to sit behind 4-5 years of the stellar 2016s. Instead we ended up with a bunch of low-ceiling 3-star types, hence some never making their mark and others topping out as role players.
• The second group, jumping ahead, is the 2021 class where COVID cancelling a year’s worth of live evaluation sessions meant Tony didn’t get to do a ton of normal recruiting evaluations, so he settled for a pair of international recruits based upon referrals from Kirk Penney and Isaiah Wilkins.
• Meanwhile, the 2019 and 2020 classes arrived on the heels of the national championship and had six well-regarded recruits between them, four consensus four stars and two other borderline Top 150 guys with high quality rival offers.

So why didn’t they pan out? Every recruitment is different, but it is troublesome to not only see UVA unable to close on some Plan A guys and fail to consistently strike gold on the 3-star Plan B’s, but also to successfully sign a number of Bennett’s 4-star Plan A targets and still see many of them leave the program after a year or two.

Which raises one final concern.

4) Questions of work ethic and entitlement.

That gold tag on the back of our jerseys, the one only national championship programs get, sure is pretty, isn’t it?

So is that national championship banner hanging in JPJ.

That’s a beautiful new banner! ?#GoHoos | #Wahoowa ?? pic.twitter.com/I0sk5HTIGs

— Virginia Cavaliers (@VirginiaSports) September 16, 2019

For every Bennett season leading up to the 2019 title, there was a chip on UVA’s shoulder, first proving they belonged on the ACC’s big stage, then on the national big stage, and finally proving they could get to and then win on the biggest stage of all at the Final Four.

Every player on UVA’s roster this year got to wear that gold tag on their jersey, yet only Kihei Clark ever did a damn thing to earn it. So many recruits, out of high school and the transfer portal alike, the last couple years joined a UVA program that had already made it. And while this is abjectly impossible to prove or quantify, you absolutely have to at least wonder what effect it may have had on the hunger and edge in the locker room.

I don’t want to let myself go down a speculative rabbit hole here. I’m not in the locker room and we here at Hoos Place only get our insider information sporadically from our friends around the program.

We’ll start with what Tony said himself in the post-game presser after the final loss to St. Bonaventure. Tony’s a measured guy, so this wasn’t some wild verbal tirade against his locker room. (A) He’s too classy for that and (B) I don’t think the work ethic issues were that bad. But I do think there were a few statements worthy of being looked closely at.

At about the 3:30 mark: “I think this offseason is important. A lot of these young men are going to have to decide how committed, how hard they’ll work, how much they’ll improve their skills, how much tougher they’ll become, and how much they love it. And they gotta take a step, they have to, they have some decisions to make about how badly they want to improve their game and then collectively… I would have loved the chance to have played in the NCAA Tournament but we didn’t earn that right.”

At about the 7:10 mark: “There’s a lot of pressure, expectations, on these young men, whether they put it on themselves, whether it’s from the outside. Where this program has been the last 8 years, it’s been at a level that’s second to none. And so when you come in and maybe you don’t have quite that kind of talent or that kind of experience, and you’re just trying to grow, that’s a lot to live up to.”

At about the 9:30 mark: “We must improve. Every player that returns in this program, they better take a step in terms of commitment and their strength and their ability and commit and work. If they don’t want to they shouldn’t be here. Don’t want them… So they gotta decide.”

Bennett took plenty of time to praise the players as well, don’t get me wrong. Praised their passion for each other’s successes, praised their improvement throughout the year. But still, there are some pointed comments in there that potentially tell us a lot about Tony’s concerns about this program’s headspace. UVA’s success was built upon guys who played with that chip on their shoulders. Guys who lived on the court and in the weight room on their off days and before practice started and in their down time just as much as they did during mandatory practices and coach-led training. We’re talking “gym rats,” guys who not just played hungry but trained hungry.

This year’s team wasn’t that. They weren’t lazy, but there was an X-Factor missing. Maybe it’s a sense of unearned entitlement that comes from the successes of the players that came before them, coasting on the prestige that their predecessors earned. It’s a battle of focus and toughness that any program that finally breaks through must learn to survive.

Look at Brian O’Connor’s baseball club in the years after finally breaking through with a CWS title in 2015. There was a program that, like Bennett’s basketball program, was in “keep knocking” mode. Oak took us to the CWS in 2009, 2011, and 2014, each time falling just short (including being the runners up in 2014). But the team still had goals to accomplish, and battled back year after year, until they finally hoisted the trophy in 2015. That team, by the end of 2015, over the previous seven seasons had made 6 Super Regionals, punching through to the CWS 4 of those times. And then, a backslide. Failing to get out of the Regionals in 2016 and 2017. Then posting losing ACC seasons and not even making the NCAA Tournament in 2018 and 2019. It took until the 2021 season (the majority of 2020 was canceled because of COVID) for the team to finally get back into a championship-worthy mindset and break back through to the CWS for the first time in 6 years.

Getting to a championship level is one kind of hard. Staying there after finally winning it all is an entirely different kind of hard. Keeping the sense of entitlement out of the locker room, and recruiting players who aren’t satisfied just to wear a jersey with that gold tag, but rather want to earn one for themselves; guys who’d rather eclipse the legacies of Guy, Jerome and Hunter rather than just live in their shadows.

Bottom line is that Tony doesn’t feel like this year’s time had that fire, focus, and commitment.

Summary

Remember that it’s all a matter of your perspective whether you want to view these four focus areas as things that went “wrong,” or just things that “could’ve gone better.” I won’t say it’s wrong to take an optimistic bent and believe whole heartedly that it just wasn’t our year and that Bennett will figure it out soon enough.

In Part 3, we’ll talk about what that process might look like. How the roster might evolve, how system strategy could shift, and how the coaching staff may have to address locker room culture as the culture of the sport morphs under the influence of the transfer portal and NIL rights.

But for today, I think it’s best just to take some time and digest the season just completed. Remember everything we said in Part 1 about being grateful for the program’s overall successes and having perspective that it still wasn’t that bad a year.

But in Tony Bennett’s words, “Always thankful, never satisfied.” And so we aren’t afraid to look honestly at what held the program back this season from reaching the heights we now know it’s fully capable of. Every year it’s something different that a particular collection of players on a given roster struggles with. And for this year’s roster, the shooting, the effect of roster continuity on the defense, the recruiting struggles of the last few years, and the work ethic inside the locker room all created a unique set of conditions to hold the Hoos back even in an otherwise down ACC.

So let’s get back together soon in Part 3 to put the past behind us and look forward instead at how our Hall of Fame coach is going to get the Hoos back into the national conversation.