Virginia concludes its 2020-21 regular season with a trip to the Yum! Center in Louisville, the site of our 2019 Oregon and Purdue wins in the NCAA Tournament but also a slate of great games, many UVA wins, against the Cards since they joined the ACC in 2014. Louisville is playing winning basketball again this year; can a slumping UVA get out of there with a victory?

Game Details:

Date/Time: Saturday, March 6th, 4:00 PM EST
Location: Yum! Center, Louisville, KY
TV: ESPN2

What ‘They’ Say

Depth Chart:

Starters

Key Reserves

The ABC’s of UL:

A) COVID and injuries have affected their continuity. It’s not quite as bad as the parade of bad luck Miami has had this year that we talked about earlier this week, but Louisville has had its share of roster hiccups this year. This has been most pronounced in the post, where veteran center Malik Williams suffered a foot injury in the fall that dragged all the way into February, and he got only 3 games under his belt before being injured again. His backup, sophomore Aidan Igiehon, was lost for the year after only 5 games. Those absences left them playing undersized at the 5 much of the year with forwards Withers and Slazinski at center, maybe the occasional appearance from not-yet-ready freshman Wiznitzer. In the backcourt, knee injuries have prevented transfer guard Charles Minlend and sophomore guard Josh Nickleberry from becoming productive parts of the rotation, limited to 6 and 8 appearances respectively this year. They also had to deal with a 2+ week COVID pause that wiped out the first half of their February, the rust showing when they returned to get blown out by UNC.

B) Carlik Jones will place on an All-ACC team. The biggest reason, despite all the roster issues, that Louisville is still in a solid position in the ACC standings come March is because of Carlik Jones, the transfer point guard from Radford. The 2020 Big South player of the year has transitioned fairly seamlessly into the higher level of competition, leading the team in both scoring and assists, and maintaining a solid efficiency despite playing the most minutes in the ACC as well as maintaining the highest shot rate. He’s on KenPom’s All-ACC 1st team at this moment, and will provide a very challenging cover for Kihei and Reece.

C) They’re winning with the Pack Line. 3rd Year Cards Coach Chris Mack is a Pack Line proponent, meaning we don’t have to do a complicated explanation of the Matchup Zone we used to do during the Pitino years. And they’re running it well, with a Top 5 defense in the ACC making up for an offense that’s struggled to be efficient this year. The defense is doing an excellent job (a) denying ball movement through the paint and then (b) forcing teams to settle for low-percentage contested 3’s. The two stats here that jump out are that Louisville opponents are taking 3’s at nearly the highest rate for any defense in the ACC, 43.4% of UL opponent shots are from deep, but they’re hitting them at the league-lowest rate of just 28.9%. That means teams are settling for bad jumpers because the Cards aren’t giving them better looks. Teams that can get to the rim hit at a high rate, as without a healthy Williams the Cards haven’t had a shot-blocking presence. But they do a good job of closing out possessions with defensive rebounds and it will be interesting to see how well UVA can run offense through the paint in this one.

Their season to date:

Louisville is 13-5 on the season, 8-4 in ACC play. In non-conference play they scored a good home win over Seton Hall but got blown out at Wisconsin. In league play, they’ve got good home wins over VT, Duke, and GT, though lost at home to FSU. They’ve struggled on the road, losing at Miami, Clemson, and UNC. Most recently they won at Duke in OT last weekend before having their mid-week contest against VT canceled due to COVID issues in Blacksburg.

Keys to getting the win:

1) Force them to settle for contested 3’s. We talked above about Louisville’s offense struggling. A lot of that is due to the Cards’ league-worst team 3P% of 29.5%. Carlik Jones, a 40% 3P shooter at Radford last year, has regressed to only 33% this year and just 26% in ACC play. David Johnson as a big shooting guard is their lone consistent threat, hitting on 37% from range on steady volume, though stretch forward Withers has hit 4-of-9 (44%) in ACC play. Youngsters Davis (22%) and Williamson (32%) are both struggling, as is stretch big Slazinski (28%). Louisville is aware of this limitation and as such take less than 30% of their shots from deep (2nd lowest rate in the ACC), but it will be up to the packline to force them to settle for contested jumpers as much as possible.

2) Defensive rebounding. Louisville is an aggressive rebounding team when they miss shots. They have the 3rd best offensive rebound rate in the ACC, with Williamson and Withers both highly effective from the forward positions. Malik Williams would’ve provided a boost here, snagging 6 total offensive rebounds over his 3 games played, but they have rebounded well even without him during most of their ACC slate. Virginia has improved its defensive rebounding the last few weeks, especially when they held ACC-5th-best offensive rebounding Duke to just 2 O-boards. But there were still some rebounding clunkers earlier in ACC play against UNC, at NC State, and Pitt, so it still needs to be an area of focus for the Hoo defense.

3) Get the ball in the paint with decisive screening action. Louisville’s given up a few big scoring days to opponents in ACC play, allowing 78 at Miami, 78 at home to FSU, and 99(!) at UNC. The common denominator in my view was that these teams didn’t settle for 3’s. Sure, they took and made some at a healthy rate (40% minimum performance by each of those opponents), but they didn’t rely on it, instead running offense through the paint. Only 20 of Miami’s 59 FGAs were from deep, 21 of FSU’s 62 shots, and 18 of UNC’s 69 shots. We talked above about Louisville’s Pack Line focusing on paint denial much the way the better UVA defenses under Bennett have, and they’ve got great length at the 2-4 to do that, but UVA needs to attack that man defense with hard, varied screening actions, both on-ball and off-, to create spaces to penetrate both with the dribble and the pass. Only then, by actually touching the paint, will the 3-point shots be there off reversals and kick-outs.

Predictions:

This is what The Athletic wrote about Louisville in Friday’s Bubble Watch:

The Cardinals are in a decent place. Even better for them, following last weekend’s overtime win at Duke, is having a week off in advance of Saturday’s home game against Virginia. The Cavaliers still carry the cachet of a top 20-ish team in the NET, but haven’t played good basketball for several weeks, losing three in a row (including at home to NC State) before Monday’s ugly home win over a barely limping Miami team. That’s an entirely winnable game for Louisville, and one that could more or less seal its spot in the tournament.

Louisville is 4th in the ACC right now but only 10th in wins, as the 12 games they’ve played is the lowest total in the league (many others have played 17). It’s a very incomplete resume, so they know this game is a brass ring for them. Beat us, cement a Top 4 seed in the ACCT, and get a marquee win over one of the ACC’s Top 2, to balance out that Miami stinker and maybe punch their ticket (barring a total flop in Greensboro, obviously).

The Yum! Center has been a bit of a home away from home for UVA lately, winning 6 straight games there between 2016 and 2019 (4-0 against UL plus the 2019 S16 and E8). But we gave up 80 points there last year in our lone loss of our final 12 games, and UVA has really only played well in one road game recently, the win at Georgia Tech. Forget the FSU loss, who’s a clear Top 2 in the ACC right now, maybe the clear #1. But Duke and VT are very much on par with Louisville (UL beat both, for what it’s worth), and UVA couldn’t win on the road against either. What that means is we’re going to have to see a road performance against Louisville better than what we’ve typically been getting out of UVA lately if we want to see a win, and frankly better than the mediocre home performances against bad NC State and Miami teams too.

I struggled with potential homerism here. The road struggles are real, and Louisville is good enough to capitalize, especially given that it’s their Senior Day with an NCAA Tournament berth very much hinging on their performance in this game. I think those factors lead them to shoot better than they usually do, but at the end of the day I think the absence of a true center for Louisville helps UVA assuming they don’t get mismatched with Huff being forced to guard the perimeter-oriented Withers and Slazinski. If Huff can stay effective defensively, it’s a good matchup for him to bounce back on offense. And even if we need to go smaller (sorry, Caffaro), we’ve got a good option in McKoy off the bench.

Hoos Win – 66-62