At multiple points in this game, particularly the first half, I mumbled to myself or my girlfriend, “Setting basketball back 60 years.”  It was ugly, ugly basketball much of the night – even uglier if you don’t love great defense.  The final score was more like an NFL game than a basketball game, and the shooting statistics were about as aesthetic as a homicidal maniac’s handiwork.  But at the end of the game, I was really happy and felt positive about the team’s performance.  After breaking down the game video, I am even happier and more positive about the team’s performance.  It was an opening game performance from which we can actually draw some reasonable conclusions about the team’s prospects, because it was a bona fide ACC opponent and not The Little Sisters of the Poor (thank you, Pete Gillen, for all your contributions to Hoo hoops lore).  Because this is a rambling impressions piece and not an analysis, I am going to just present a list of points in no particular order:

• All of the returning veterans played like veterans of a national championship campaign, including “grizzled veteran” true sophomore Kihei Clark.  The young floor general appears to have made that “sophomore jump” that Bennett guards tend to make.  But it was Mamadi Diakite who really jumped out with his maturity.  He’s a fifth year senior now, and he looked like a veteran of five tours.  His defense was impressive on first watch; upon film breakdown it was truly superlative.  Jordan Sperber highlighted one possession where Mamadi was all over the place, but there really was nothing special about that possession.  Mamadi showed an innate awareness not only of where he should be at any given moment, but also where each of his teammates was and should have been.  He played with Isaiah Wilkins’ awareness and anticipation.  He and Jay Huff covered for each masterfully almost every moment of the game.  Mamadi defensively looks to be becoming the player we all thought he could be when he signed: a horizontal menace a la Akil Mitchell or Isaiah Wilkins and a vertical menace a la Chris Alexander (nobody can touch Ralph). If he continues at this level there is no way he won’t be ACC DPOY, and it’s hard to see him not being national DPOY.

   

  MamaDPOY

  by Seattle Hoo

  These kinds of plays make Mamadi the best defender in college basketball

  If Mamadi builds on his offensive performance in this game, he could very well end up being ACC POY.  Not only did he have a good statistical game with 60% shooting and 25% of his team’s points, but his floor game was solid.  He only took one shot that I would have liked to see him pass off, and none of his shots were those give-up fadeaway turnaround jumpers from post position three feet outside of the lane that he took far too often his first few years and that always made me want to take him out of the game.  His jumpers were all aggressive takes moving toward or squaring up toward the basket. They were the shot for the moment and position in which he caught the ball. He also attacked the rim with the dribble several times, and his screen-roll and cutting game were at his normal high level. Syracuse’s defense does not call for much screening, but there were a few plays where a Mamadi screen created an opening his teammates were able to exploit.  To really see where Mamadi is offensively we will have to watch him against some teams with quality man-to-man defenses.

• It could very well end up that Mamadi’s main competition for POY awards will be internal. As destructive as Mamadi was, Kihei Clark similarly dominated on defense. Only once did his man get by him, and promptly ran into Jay Huff enabling the Mong00se to recover and snatch the ball out of his hands. On another play Kihei was overpowered on a drive to the basket where I felt Mamadi was wrongly called for a foul.  Other than that, Kihei harassed the ballhandler, snuffed drives, and kept ‘Cuse freshman sharpshooter Joe Girard III from being able to get any good looks.  Offensively, Kihei asserted himself as a shooter, hoisting 8 good three-point attempts. His 25% conversion rate was not good, but if one of his misses bounces in off the rim instead of out, he’s at 38%, my season goal.  His shots were good, and they were all on the rim. He does need to cut the turnovers in half. He needs to drive to score more than driving to pass, because the defense was covering the passes and Kihei forced several tough bounce passes to his big men. Without some great catches by Mamadi, Kihei’s turnover total could have been higher. On some of those drives, he could have shot the ball as soon as he penetrated the first line, lofting a runner over the big man. As long as he gets the shot over the big man, even his misses are likely to be assists, because we have three excellent offensive rebounders.  But in general, Kihei ran the offense with aplomb and he took good shots.  He finished with a points-rebounds double-double and served notice on the ACC that he is a player who can drop some points on you.  His 7 assists in a low-possession, low-field goals game are impressive.  He showed the poise we were expecting and played strong throughout a 40-minute performance, the first of many this season.

• 29, 11, 12, 1.  Those are the numbers we’ve been wanting to see from Jay Huff.  29 minutes.  11 points.  12 rebounds.  1 personal foul.  Jay came into the game overly unselfish on the offensive end, but stalwart on defense and the boards.  After a time out in which Tony must have told him to be the Hoonicorn and not a spear-carrier, Jay stopped throwing the ball away in his haste to give it up to someone else and started attacking the defense.  He didn’t miss a shot until the last couple of minutes and combined with Mamadi to dominate the paint.  Jay did all his damage inside the paint in this one, never even venturing out to the three-point arc, much less attempting one. But that is a product of playing against Syracuse.  Look for the high ball screen and top-of-the-key positioning to return when the defenses go man-to-man.  It’s good to know that at least against teams without big, physical post defenders Jay can be a scoring force in the paint.  He and Mamadi also played extremely well together, combining on some scoring plays, controlling the boards, and covering for each other in the defense so that the rim was always protected and screens were well-defended. In my close watching of Jay, I did not spot blown assignments and he looked to be attacking screens and recovering smoothly to reset coverages and box out. Also, contrary to last season, his effectiveness did not noticeably tail off after the first couple of minutes.  He was better able both physically and mentally to keep up with the game.

  If Jay builds off of his performance in this game, he could be another internal competition for some POY awards.  Give him 29 minutes against an average ACC man-to-man defense and it’s not difficult to see him dropping 25.  If he does continue to put up 29-minute, 1-foul performances on a consistent basis this season, this will be our last year to enjoy Jay Huff in a Virginia uniform.

• The other veteran, Braxton Key, continued his floor game from the NCAA Tournament, in which he began to show a full grasp of the team defensive principles.  With his assignments and rotations better understood, his general playmaking ability is more on display on that end.  He continued his strong rebounding with 10 boards and he was equally effective guarding the ball on the perimeter and being a post defender in the Packline.  On offense, he got to his spots and made good decisions, but was the same Braxton Key in terms of putting the ball in the basket.  He’s just this team’s Cornell Parker: you know every shot is an adventure, but you deal with it because of all the other things he does for you.
• Kody Stattmann made his first appearance at UVA as a regular rotation player, and he looked much better than anyone who doesn’t have access to Tony Bennett’s practices anticipated he would look.  He didn’t exactly light it up but his 5 points on 50% shooting all came at once and they were the baskets that broke the game.  First he made a real nice relocation off a Kihei Clark drive and drained a wide open three to bounce a 12-point lead up to 15, then his nifty reverse layup made it a 16-point game. Syracuse never challenged after that sequence.  Kody moved well without the ball, shot with confidence, and was a smooth and confident passer. He looked the most comfortable of UVA’s perimeter players at passing the ball into the middle of the zone. On defense he looked the part of a UVA defender, even stonewalling Buddy Boeheim on several drive attempts and getting the highlight reel block of a jump shot.  It validated what we’ve been hearing out of training camp.  If his 21 minutes were a harbinger of things to come, the perimeter depth issues are going to be far less drastic than feared coming into the season (similar to how the emergence of Kihei Clark made all of us forget how worried we were about perimeter depth leading into last season).

• Aside from a couple of hideous three-point attempts and some freshman turnovers, Casey Morsell’s college debut was a successful one.  He gave 26 minutes as a starter, concentrated on the defensive end where he showed his chops, made life miserable for Syracuse’s #1 scorer Elijah Hughes, generated his first college highlights, and had few if any glaring missed assignments.  On one play in the first half he showed why the ACC should be afraid, very afraid, with a stunning blocked shot (then promptly committed a freshman blunder I am fairly certain he will never do again when he tried to dribble in traffic in the backcourt and gave back the very three points he had just taken away):

  Casey’s one basket was a dead-eye three-pointer from the top of the key off a nice drive and dish.  No need to worry about the missed shots, turnovers and overall appearance of nerves: those will be gone by early February and Casey is going to be a two-way stud for the remainder of his college career (consider a fourth year a bonus).

• Tomas Woldetensae and Justin McKoy showed less readiness for prime time, although neither player hurt the Hoos during his stints on the floor.  McKoy was aggressive out there and Woldetensae had some good moments on defense (and some out-of-position ones) and took his shots on offense.  We’ll ascribe his misses to first-game jitters and first trip to the Dome, where very few players shoot well.
• All things considered, no real surprises in the rotation or how the players looked relative to each other, except maybe Kody Stattmann’s very positive outing.  The defense looked at the upper level of what we could have expected and the offense was about average.  Accounting for Syracuse’s zone and the normal early season gelling process, the offensive performance was promising.  The guards won’t shoot that poorly from the arc most game and Huff didn’t even step out there.  The inside game looked the strongest it has since Tobey and Gill graduated.  I am looking forward to the UNC game on December 7, when we will get to see the offense against an ACC man-to-man defense, and the Cole Anthony-Kihei Clark matchup.