The Virginia basketball team added another ACC win to its resume on Saturday with a 60-48 victory against North Carolina. The Hoos smothered the usually active Tar Heel offense once again as this marked the fourth straight game in the John Paul Jones Arena that Carolina failed to reach 50 points. The Double Bonus is back to look at some other trends.

Shooting At The Rim

In a stretch during mid to late January, the Virginia offense was clicking and putting up points at an impressive rate that saw the Hoos score 80+ points in three out of four games. Since that outburst, however, the Cavalier offense has fallen off a bit with more than 70 points just once and totals of 51, 64, 57, and 60 for the other four games. So what happened? The knee-jerk guess might be ‘live by the 3, die by the 3’ since this year’s team takes 3-pointers at a high volume (42.6% of the shots are 3’s, 54th nationally) and opponents have tried to key on Sam Hauser, Jay Huff, and Trey Murphy III as the chief shooting threats.

A closer look shows that the bigger damage seems to be coming from shots inside the arc (plus an increase in turnovers in some of the games). Looking again at the three 80-point outings, here’s what we find for 2-point shots overall and for shots at the rim (layups or dunks):

• Notre Dame: 19-33 shooting on 2’s (57.6%)
• Notre Dame: 11-17 shooting on layups/dunks (64.7%)
• Clemson: 19-29 shooting on 2’s (65.5%)
• Clemson: 10-15 shooting on layups/dunks (66.7%)
• Syracuse: 15-28 shooting on 2’s (53.6%)
• Syracuse: 12-15 shooting on layups/dunks (80.0%)

For the latest five-game stretch, here’s the same breakdown:

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