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With 10 points, Lars Mikalauskas scored in double figures for the third straight game, the longest such streak of his career. |
For the first 11 minutes of Wednesday night’s game with Duke, the Virginia men’s basketball team contained the Blue Devils’ high-powered offense and battled toe-to-toe with the nation’s sixth-ranked team. In the final 29 minutes, however, the same issues that have plagued this year’s Cavaliers throughout the ACC season – namely inconsistent defense and impatient offense – cost the team any chance of an upset.
Duke scored 64 points in the final 29 minutes and all but cruised to the 86-70 victory, fending off a brief tease of a comeback en route to its 26th win of the season. The Cavs, meanwhile, fell to 14-14 with the loss.
“As part of our pregame preparation we talked about taking it from TV timeout to TV timeout. Their mindset never changes. If you watch them during the year, they could be down 18 to Miami, they could be up 20 at home to St. John’s, they play the same way mentally,” Virginia coach Dave Leitao said. “It becomes harder for us to make that fourth and fifth stop because they just keep playing through it. The only way that teams have been able to be successful is they play the same kind of aggressive offense and try to keep the games as close as you can.”
“I was proud of our team tonight. They really prepared hard for this game, and we had a lot of energy even at the shoot-around today because we knew that Virginia was playing it’s best basketball of the season,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “To their credit, in the last two weeks they could be undefeated – the games were close, one possession games. … It was a big win for our basketball team. Our kids have been terrific all year, and they came to play tonight.”
With 8:34 remaining the first half, Virginia looked like it was ready to trade punches with the visiting Devils. After all, Lars Mikalauskas (10 points, 4 rebounds) had just completed a traditional 3-point play to give UVa a 26-22 lead, a sequence punctuated with a double bicep flex and yell from the Lithuanian sparkplug. The crowd roared with support in anticipation of a brewing slugfest.
Duke responded with a flurry of jabs and a virtual knockout punch to essentially put those thoughts to bed.
The visitors closed the half on a 21-5 scoring surge, which including a 15-0 stretch between a Mamadi Diane 3-pointer (the hosts’ final lead at 29-28) and two Diane (12 points, 1 block, 1 steal) free throws with 38 seconds to play. The slow-and-steady run finished with a haymaker to the jaw as DeMarcus Nelson (16 points, 4 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal) drained a 3-pointer with 55 seconds remaining in the half to give Duke a 14-point lead; Gerald Henderson (19 points, 7 rebounds, 4 assists, 1 steal) drove into the lane and kicked the ball out to assist on the shot, a connection that appeared again the second half to end the Cavs’ final push for a comeback.
“What happened is they missed a couple of open shots while we were in zone and we were able to get a double-digit lead. Then DeMarcus hit that big 3, almost hit two in a row, in the last minute of the first half,” Krzyzewski said.
Indeed, a key element of Duke’s half-ending surge was a strategic shift on the defensive end. The Blue Devils slipped into a 2-3 zone for the final 8 or 9 minutes of the half and Virginia unraveled on the offensive end.
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Sean Singletary scored 18 points to reach 1,975 for his career. He is now fifth all-time on the scoring list just ahead of Junior Burrough. |
“I was really concerned [about Sean Singletary ‘s 9 points in the first 6 minutes]. That was one of the reasons we ended up going zone to try to stop him. He is so good, and so fast,” Krzyzewski said. “They actually put four perimeter guys in, and were overloading with Adrian Joseph in the corner. So they did some nice things against it. And we were lucky they missed some shots, you have to be a little bit lucky when you are [playing zone]. I thought what they did was very well conceived; they just missed a few shots. We must have played around eight minutes of zone in the first half, and then in the second half I thought we should not have started with zone because that is not who we are.”
Singletary (18 points, 7 assists) and the Cavs had success prior to the switch by driving the basketball into the paint. But the zone stopped the players from penetrating the lane with any consistency and the offense as a whole became passive. While the Hoos did overload a side with four players at times against the zone, they did not force the defense to cover much ground with side-to-side ball movement and shifting overloads. Often the result was impatient shots and sluggish offensive sets.
“Obviously once they switched to a zone and kept Sean Singletary from penetrating up top, it put the onus on everybody else to be more aggressive and what has happened to us on different occasions is we get a little bit passive on that side of the floor, stop attacking the middle of the zone and get back on our heels which is what happened and gave them a double figure lead before halftime,” Leitao said.
“They went into the zone and we couldn’t run and then they had two or three people on me,” Singletary said. “They forced everybody else to try and beat them.”
Statistics | UVa Media Relations Notes
