Virginia Basketball Double Bonus: Virginia Tech

The Virginia basketball team continued its strong play at the John Paul Jones Arena on Wednesday night with a 65-57 win against Virginia Tech. That pushed the Hoos’ home winning streak to 20 games. The Double Bonus is back for a look at the rivalry victory.

Virginia Putt Kidd In Play

A lot of the postgame discussion around the matchup focused on the defensive job the Cavaliers did against Virginia Tech’s Lynn Kidd. He scored 2 points on 1-3 shooting with only 2 rebounds. Kidd has averaged 14.0 points per game on 66% shooting this season so he took a big dip against the Wahoos.

UVA’s Jordan Minor had a lot to do with that as he played many possessions of one-on-one defense in the post against Kidd. With that said, Kidd only played 16 minutes, 8 minutes short of his season-long average of 24 minutes per game. At least part of that came from the fact that he struggled defensively dealing with UVA, who took advantage of it. On the broadcast, analyst Seth Greenberg brought up the pocket passes to Minor on the baseline frequently. While Kidd wasn’t always the defender in those cases, he did have trouble with it regularly.

Here’s one example of the pass problems for Kidd. On this play, Minor passes the ball to the top with Andrew Rohde and then sets the pin-down screen for Reece Beekman. The Hokies’ MJ Collins tries to lock and trail around the screen, but Kidd steps much higher up the floor in curl protection that most UVA opponents have done lately. Opponents have wanted the Hoos to have to pull up and make that mid-range jumper vs. trying to fully take it away. In this case, Kidd comes up too high and Beekman fires the over-the-top pass to Minor for a dunk.

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