Sizzling shooting by Louisville combined with one of Virginia’s worst halves offensively this season left the Hoos with a deep deficit at halftime Saturday. It didn’t matter in the end. UVA responded with a dominant second half performance and snared a 64-52 win in the process.
The victory marked the fifth road win against a top 25 ranked opponent this season. It was the fourth ranked road win in league play, surpassing the 1981 team’s three wins in the same category. The Cavaliers have eight wins against ranked teams this season and they’re 9-1 in true road games too.
“We played well,” UVA coach Tony Bennett said. “I have so much respect for the Louisville program, in terms of, Coach [Chris] Mack and his staff now. The battles that we had with them when it was Coach [David] Padgett, and obviously Coach [Rick] Pitino. This is one of the more beautiful venues that you’re going to play in. The fanbase, they care, you just feel it. You feel it in the arena. There’s talented players so you know that you have got to play well. Our guys answered the call every time we’ve played them in these games. It was so improbable last year, but this one was the way you’re supposed to come back. Last year, I don’t know, but this year is how you have to do it when you’re in those spots.”
Getting Saturday’s game into the win column took some resilience and some work after halftime. The Cardinals pushed ahead midway through the first half with a quick 9-0 run that created a 25-13 lead and they still led by 10 at halftime thanks to a buzzer-beating 3-point bank shot from Jordan Nwora just after he crossed halfcourt.
That running shot provided the perfect cap to the first half for the hosts, who had it cooking from long range in the opening 20 minutes. Louisville made 10 of 16 3-pointers in the first half (62.5%) to produce 30 of its 37 points before intermission. The shots were falling from multiple sources as Dwayne Sutton, Ryan McMahon, Christen Cunningham, and Nwora all made at least one. The 9-0 run just after the 10:00 mark in the first half came from a string of triples too. Nwora hit the first and McMahon followed with two more in a span of 1:03 to prompt a timeout from Bennett.
Nwora finished with 17 points and McMahon added 12. Cunningham posted 9 points and 6 assists, while Sutton tallied 8 points and 11 rebounds.
Virginia, meanwhile, couldn’t find the touch from the behind the arc. The Hoos didn’t make a single 3-pointer in the first half (0-11) and De’Andre Hunter hit the bench with two fouls for the final 9:21. Louisville threw a 1-3-1 zone at UVA too and that served to disrupt things offensively as well.
The visitors ended up matching their lowest scoring first half of the season with 27 points and it could have been worse if Jay Huff didn’t sub in with 10 points over the final 8:42. Huff delivered several buckets near the rim, including a tough one-handed alley-oop dunk from Kihei Clark to help bust the Cardinal zone.
That all added up to a 10-point deficit at halftime, the largest hole of the season for the Wahoos. They only trailed at halftime previously in the two games against Duke and that was by a combined nine points. Bennett wasn’t sure if his team was in a good position or not. To be trailing by just 10 after that 3-point barrage could have felt fortunate, but to be trailing by the biggest margin of the season at intermission could have been deflating.
“I wasn’t sure,” Bennett said “While they were shooting the ball well, we broke down a couple times. We were a little slow getting to the shooters, but they shoot…I mean it’s in their hands and it’s off, and we’ve seen them do that. At least if we’re there a little quicker and they’re making them, we’ll live with it, but we’ve got to get there quicker. I didn’t know because they’re hard to guard, they’re disciplined, they threw the 1-3-1 at us that they hadn’t showed a lot. They played, I think, only one possession against Duke, so we were a little confused. I thought when De’Andre got in foul trouble, Jay Huff gave us a great lift offensively, and I thought De’Andre was special today. The way he played, that was a special performance. I liked the individual defense on the interior, the individual defense sometimes bothering some shooters in the second half. It was really a gritty second half for us, though we didn’t even shoot it – I think Dre is the only one who hit the 3’s – we didn’t shoot it well, but we took care of the ball and got some pressure with Kihei and finished it the right way.”
Indeed, Hunter keyed UVA’s dominant second half as he flipped inside and outside to break apart Louisville’s defense. Hunter poured in a career-high 26 points with 19 of them coming after halftime. His second half effort started with a dunk, but he also stepped outside to hit a pair of 3-pointers and played as a screener in the pick-and-roll offense for a couple of interior catches too. He made 9 of 11 shots and all six of his free throw attempts.
Hunter topped that off with a great second half defensively too as he picked up Nwora for long stretches to help cool off Louisville. The Cardinals made just 2 of 17 triples after halftime, a rough shooting 20 minutes that fittingly ended with an airball from downtown.
“He’s just continuing to evolve his game, you can see it,” Bennett said. “He’s improving and he’s just playing at a high level. In practice he shows signs of that, of course, but to do it in games is a little different, when we needed it. There’re some other really good players on the floor, so the spacing and things like that allow him for that. When he’s at the four, he’s a matchup problem. Just like when Nwora is at the four, he can be a matchup problem. That’s the way the game is going with guys like that, at times, playing those spots.”
With Hunter providing that firepower, Virginia still needed other sources of scoring as Ty Jerome and Kyle Guy each struggled. Neither hit a 3-pointer in the game, breaking a 25-game streak for Guy. They combined for just 12 points. Huff’s big first half pushed him into double figures with 12 points to offset some of that void and Mamadi Diakite provided the rest of the scoring punch needed. He put in 14 points on 7-of-10 shooting to with 5 rebounds and 3 blocked shots.
When Louisville’s 3-point shooting dried up, it had trouble producing more points. That wasn’t the case for the Hoos.
“Again, you can’t be a donut for 30 minutes,” Mack said. “You cannot just swirl on the perimeter. I mean, we have a good shooting team, those looks are generated by drive kicks, and we want to take those. They didn’t fall like they were in the first half. We’ve got to be able to mix up, getting an offensive rebound or two, getting a putback.”
The Cavaliers ended up with a 38-4 advantage in the paint.
“We’re such a post scoring team, I don’t know what else to tell you,” Bennett said with a grin. “There are different ways to get it in the paint, and again whether it was drives or tough finishes, Mamadi and Jay gave us a lift. I didn’t play Braxton [Key] and Jack [Salt] in the second half. I just went with what I thought defensively with the matchups and the way it was, but the rebounding and the tough play in the lane, some drop passes and pocket passes, nice things happened off the ball screen. We were so much better in the second half and tried to just stay the course.”
This was a big win in that Louisville still has some of the great talent that Rick PIMPtino bought, and the new coach actually teaches fundamentals such as how to run an inbounds play.