road sweet road

This was a rotten weekend to be a Panther.  The Super Bowl did not go their way, the NHL's Florida Panthers lost on Saturday, and so, believe it or not, did most D-I basketball teams of that nickname.

In the case of the Pittsburgh variety, it was cruelly done.  Malcolm Brogdon returned to the building where two years ago he shanked the hopes and dreams of a raucous crowd with a buzzer-beating three, and this time gave them no reason to stay excited for that long.  Brogdon put 21 points on the board and extended his team's winning streak to six.

This is what a top-ten team is supposed to do, repeatedly.  I also did say, a little while ago, that the ACC is supposed to be this minefield of obstacles, and those two statements don't seem to jibe at first glance.  But you're not one of the top teams in the conference if you keep stepping on the mines.  And if and when you do rise to the top, as UVA has been doing the last couple weeks, you become that top-ten team.  I recall, in the days B.T. (Before Tony), even when UVA had a good team, the elite teams (mainly the Tobacco Road ones) would still come in, generate a lot of buzz around Grounds, and then generally bomb us back to the stone age.

Life on the other side of those trenches is pretty good.  For two successive weekends now, an opponent of perfectly good standing in the conference has welcomed UVA to their gym, packed the house and legitimately fired up the crowd, and then skulked out with welts on their backside.  UVA hadn't held an ACC opponent under a point-per-possession all year, until they did so at Louisville, and now rides a three-game streak of doing so.  That's twice, in case you lost count, in someone else's full and very loud gymnasium.  Should they shut up three road crowds in a row, it would be the most satisfying road win of all time.

Actually, this is just the right week to really get the chemistry perfected.  VT visits on Tuesday and then the Hoos are in Durham on Saturday.  Getting it right against Clemson is fine, but not every win is created equal.  A couple months ago I prematurely declared the chemistry experiment finished, and UVA ready to open up with both guns.  They were not.  This time around, with the defense much more locked in, they just might be.

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-- One reason I have legitimate hope for the chemistry this time around is the play of the bench in the second half.  During a roughly five minute run with all of UVA's stars on the bench (Brogdon, Gill, Perrantes) UVA stretched the lead against most of Pitt's starters.  I was even leery of seeing them subbed back out - sometimes you just roll with what's working - but the starters came back in nice and fresh and picked up right where the subs left off.

-- I don't think I've ever seen UVA be the beneficiary of such a clearly bullshit call as the offensive goaltending the refs (with Jamie Luckie in charge, natch) slapped on Pitt.  Not only was the ball four inches off the rim, it was part way below it.

-- The Louisville game was even worse in the refs department.  The crowd was clearly pissed, and they mostly had a right to be, except that they were getting their fair share of nonsense calls too.

-- I still can't decide whether Ike Wilkins should develop his big-man game or small-man game.  Is he a really big frontcourt player who can post up and guard down low, or is he a smallish stretch power forward?  Where he plays on defense strongly suggests the latter - but then, look at all the jump shots he makes, or that pass to Gill for the dunk on a fast break.  Evan Nolte has at times been used on both sides of that equation, and Wilkins probably will over the next couple years, too.

-- I'm not very wild about the three-game football series with ODU that UVA just announced.  You can put me in the camp that says we have very little to gain and a great deal to lose.  Lose just one of those games and you hand ODU a great reason to keep all those Tidewater players right where they are.  It's not like we should need to play a game in Norfolk to establish a recruiting presence there.  That series doesn't start til Bronco's third season, though, so hopefully the team has a culture change well on the way by then.  And if I still lived five minutes from the ODU campus, which I did, ten years ago, I'd be all about the idea.  As I'm sure 757 Hoos are right now.  It's not all bad, but I think there are better scheduling ideas out there.

game preview: Old Dominion

Date/Time: Saturday, December 22; 5:30

TV: NBC Sports Network

Record against the Monarchs: 9-4

Last meeting: UVA 80, ODU 76; 3/24/08, Charlottesville (CBI 2nd round)

Last game: UVA 75, Morg. St. 57 (12/19); CofC 76, ODU 65 (12/16)

KenPom breakdown:

Tempo:
UVA: 60.7 (#344)
ODU: 66.0 (#223)

Offense:
UVA: 103.1 (#104)
ODU: 97.9 (#196)

Defense:
UVA: 87.2 (#14)
ODU: 104.3 (#273)

Pythag:
UVA: .8487 (#33)
ODU: .3425 (#234)

Projected starting lineups:

Virginia:

PG: Teven Jones (3.9 ppg, 1.1 rpg, 2.4 apg)
SG: Paul Jesperson (4.6 ppg, 2.5 rpg, 1.5 apg)
SF: Joe Harris (14.7 ppg, 4.1 rpg, 2.5 apg)
PF: Akil Mitchell (13.5 ppg, 9.5 rpg, 2.0 apg)
PF: Darion Atkins (9.2 ppg, 5.3 rpg, 0.7 apg)

Old Dominion:

PG: Keenan Palmore (8.5 ppg, 5.2 rpg, 3.2 apg)
SG: Donte Hill (10.2 ppg, 4.2 rpg, 2.8 apg)
G: Aaron Bacote (7.5 ppg, 2.1 rpg, 2.2 apg)
PF: Nick Wright (7.2 ppg, 4.8 rpg, 0.7 apg)
C: DeShawn Painter (10.9 ppg, 7.4 rpg, 0.6)

Time was, scheduling and beating CAA teams was a decent way to keep your RPI looking nice and fresh.  This year, not so much, especially here.  Old Dominion has managed to fall hellaciously short of expectations and probably won't end up fourth in the conference as they were predicted to by the media before the season.  If they do, the CAA is even worse than it looks now.

This game against ODU is part of something called the "Governor's Holiday Hoops Classic" which is not something you can win, it's just a way to try and get schools from the state of Virginia to play each other more often.  And even then it's only two games this year and two games next and after that they'll see.  UVA comes in with an eight-game winning streak, which is still shorter than ODU's current losing streak, and with any luck I didn't just jinx both of those and they can continue beyond Saturday.

-- UVA on offense

ODU's awful losing streak is probably about 2/3rds on their defense, which is poor.  During those nine games, they've allowed 1.15 points per possession, a terrible number, and that's a stretch that hasn't been filled with good teams.  Teams are hitting on more than 50% of their twos, almost 40% of their threes, which gives ODU's opponents an effective FG% of 55.2%, which in turn is 327th in the country.  Not good.  It'd be worse if ODU's opponents could shoot free throws (a stat, as you might guess, that is totally out of ODU's hands) but they're "allowing" a free-throw percentage of only 64.5.  Decent foul shooting would push their defensive KenPom stat even further into the basement.

It'd be even worse if ODU didn't have a couple of guards able to create turnovers.  Both Keenan Palmore and Donte Hill are getting two steals a game, which if you follow the mathematical logic is better than four points taken off the board for ODU's opponents.  However, the Monarchs don't have good size in the frontcourt.  NC State transfer DeShawn Painter is 6'9", 235, and center Anton Larsen (who sits at the very back end of the rotation with only 12 minutes a game) is 7'0", 240.  That's the full list of rotation players over 220 pounds.  What height they have is mostly of the lanky, skinny variety.  This is where guys like Akil Mitchell and Darion Atkins will be salivating; they're almost certainly more athletic than everyone but Painter, and bigger and stronger too.

I didn't have any problems with the effort against Morgan State, but the mental rust from the finals break was plain to see and it resulted in a lot of sloppy play.  ODU's guards are probably good enough to take advantage of a repeat.  But as long as the team got their mind right, the opportunities will be there, probably time and time again.  The Monarchs simply won't be able to guard both Mitchell and Atkins, maybe neither, and scoring should not be too difficult as long as the Hoos take care of the ball.

-- UVA on defense

Despite the losing streak, Old Dominion hasn't been a complete trainwreck on offense.  I guess if that's the best you can say about them, they're not good, but at least they have a balanced approach.  ODU uses a nine-man rotation, all of whom have started at least three games - it's not a settled starting lineup right now, obviously.  And while their top two scorers - DeShawn Painter and Donte Hill - only have 10.9 and 10.2 ppg, respectively, the Monarchs do spread out the scoring, such that eight of those nine rotation guys score between 5 and 11 points a game.

Painter is the top cat in the Monarch offense, a legitimate scoring power forward (nominally a center, but at 6'9", not really - his game is much more forward than true 5) who can score out to about 15 feet and hits the offensive glass very well.  Hill, though, is mostly a volume scorer.  The reason he's got more points per game than Palmore is because he shoots threes and Palmore doesn't.  Both guards will do their share of the ballhandling, to take a little pressure off of the freshman Palmore.

The rest of the ODU offense is pretty pedestrian.  Freshman wing Aaron Bacote is a decent three-point shooter (really the only real long-ball threat on the team) but is a little on the turnover-prone side.  Nick Wright and Dimitri Batten were much better shooters last year and haven't found the touch this season.  ODU as a team is shooting three-pointers very poorly, and only back-of-the-rotation forward Richard Ross has a shooting percentage worth a second look.  He's shooting .604; nobody else is above .460, and most of the team is below .410.

If ODU is going to shoot three-pointers that badly (that is, 318th in the country), UVA will probably be content to let them.  Down low, only Painter is a threat, and UVA has proven capable of entirely closing down the paint to such players (think Jared Berggren) especially when they're not that worried about the opponents' alternatives.

-- Outlook

Good for the game, not so good for the RPI.  Fortunately, it's a neutral-site game, which won't help in the SOS category but will be a slight bonus (or actually, lack of home-court penalty) for the win.  Assuming, of course, that we do.  I see no reason not to be confident, though.

Final score: UVA 71, ODU 53