Dom Starsia's formula for success has never really been a secret. Recruit the most athletic players he can find, emphasize hard work and effort, and give them copious freedom to operate. When it works, it's dynamic and entertaining.
Alas for Starsia's less-talented squads, "play smart" isn't a top priority.
This has been eminently on display the past couple weeks. UVA had three times as many turnovers as goals against UNC, and over twice as many against Duke. When we got a peek into the timeout huddle during the Duke game, I thought Dom might suggest, just once, that a handy trick for winning the game might be to observe the fundamentals of passing and catching. He didn't. He did exhort his team to have an extended possession, which might have been a roundabout way of doing so. They must've decided 30 seconds was extended enough, because about that much game time later Duke was merrily clearing the ball and finding a nice easy path to the goal.
Observing the fundamentals of passing and catching has been awfully damn elusive of late. Simply put, this is some horsecrap sloppy-ass lacrosse they're playing. I'd like to blame it on youth, but there was Owen Van Arsdale lazily reaching toward a lazy pass, and missing. There was Tyler German with a laser focus on reaching the corner of the box to complete a clear and no plan at all upon arriving, coughing up the ball as a result. There was Ryan Tucker dodging his way straight into a double-team and freezing, paralyzed with indecision at the gall of the defenders to be defending.
Of course this team went 0-4 in the ACC; it's unrealistic to expect any wins when the offense, supposedly the highly efficient hallmark of this team, keeps shooting itself in the head. I could deal with it if opposing defenses were taking the ball, or their goalie was putting up a stone wall, but what's really frustrating to watch is when two former weaknesses stop being weaknesses, and the strength of the team suddenly turns into brainless mush.
This team will still make the tournament and will probably host a game. For all its irritating foibles, it's still one of the top eight teams in the country. That's pretty amazing after losing to the whole ACC in ugly fashion, but it's taken really good teams to expose UVA's flaws enough to beat them. I mean, at least we're not Hopkins, which just needed two overtimes to beat 3-8 Penn State. The angst here is rooted in not being much of a national title contender. At least if we're gonna be angsty about lacrosse, it's the right kind of emo.
Notes and stuff:
-- Matt Barrett, man. UVA just wasted two of the best performances by a UVA goalie in I don't even know how long. Very often in lacrosse, good goalie play is indistinguishable from bad goalie play until after the fact. It's not like hockey where a bad goal sticks out like a sore thumb; you just sort of start coming to the realization that your goalie has let in too many shots. If that realization doesn't happen, you've been getting good goalie play. That's what Adam Ghitelman was like. That's not what Matt Barrett has been like; he's made stops goalies have no business making. My personal favorite was having his pass intercepted from a foot and a half away - very bad - then making the save from the same distance - even better.
-- Remember how Matt White kept playing midfield when he should've been playing attack and everyone was all "WHY??" It's almost like having Greg Coholan at attack is balancing that out. The only difference is everyone knows why Coholan is playing attack. (No Pannell.) Frankly, though, it's a shame the depth at attack is such that it's preferable to cannibalize the midfield.
-- Stupidball, by the way, has not been limited to these last two games. UVA won the Hopkins game despite taking multiple pages out of the Mike London Textbook of Personnel Management. This included but was not limited to a player entirely forgetting that he was supposed to be on the field and wasting most of an EMO as a result. I bring this old news up to illustrate what a season-long struggle this has been. And the announcers, by the way, made a habit of pointing out a number of bad substitutions on UVA's part against Duke.
-- At least UVA gets a moral victory by not pulling off the Duke game's worst moment. No, that was Duke's befuddling clear attempt in the second quarter, forgetting entirely about the 30-second clock. It was a hell of a lot of fun to watch Duke piddle the whole time limit away for absolutely no reason, spoiled only by the announcers completely ignoring it and carrying on their talk-show conversation about something totally unrelated. You want to know why people don't watch lacrosse as much as you'd like? It's because when little-used rules come into play, the announcers are too busy blathering to explain the odd situation on the field.
-- I said it as part of bracketology yesterday, but it bears repeating: Beat Georgetown and a tourney home game is a lock.
Showing posts with label white. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white. Show all posts
Monday, April 13, 2015
Friday, March 15, 2013
game preview: Ohio State
Date/Time: Saturday, March 16; 3:00
TV: Cavaliers Live
Record against the Buckeyes: 6-0
Last meeting: UVA 11, OSU 9; 3/17/12, Columbus
Last game: Cornell 12, UVA 11 (3/9); DU 10, OSU 9 (3/9)
Rankings: UVA #11/#9, OSU #12/#12
Efficiency stats:
Faceoffs:
UVA: 54.7% (#11)
OSU: 58.3% (#17)
Clearing (offense):
UVA: 93.2% (#3)
OSU: 91.8% (#7)
Clearing (defense):
UVA: 79.5% (#8)
OSU: 90.5% (#57)
Scoring % (offense):
UVA: 34.8% (#23)
OSU: 35.5% (#19)
Scoring % (defense):
UVA: 30.1% (#21)
OSU: 28.5% (#12)
O-rating:
UVA: 16.20 (#20)
OSU: 15.97 (#21)
D-rating:
UVA: 12.84 (#14)
OSU: 13.01 (#15)
(Ratings are my KenPom-esque measures of efficiency for lacrosse. Numbers are schedule-adjusted. National average is about 15.1.)
With one bubble team now having fallen very ingloriously off the bubble for good (I think a close loss to NC State would've at least kept us on the horse, but losing by twenty is the likely coup de grace), it's time to turn our attention to another bubble team: the lacrosse one.
This blog's yearly lacrosse bracketology will make its 2013 debut this Sunday, and already I fully expect the Hoos to be starting from a lower position than we're used to. With very narrow losses to Syracuse and Cornell, each week now brings more or less a must-win game in order to stake a tourney claim. Remember, the autobids expanded by one, which leaves even less margin for error for UVA in the weeks ahead. The Hoos must find a feather for their cap somewhere. Ohio State isn't it, but without one, we really can't afford a loss, either.
-- UVA on offense
If truth be told, I would point to the offense as the reason the Hoos couldn't quite get past Syracuse or Cornell, and had trouble with Vermont besides. UVA is scoring at a slightly lower rate than they did in 2011 and 2012, and that's with the schedule still mostly composed of cupcakes and lacking Hopkins and the ACC. And, come to think of it, Ohio State's not-shabby defense.
Actually, the Buckeyes are a little less of a wall than they've been in the past. They're playing faster, too; in the past, they've had the reputation of being the UVA of the lacrosse world, but they're more or less mid-pack in terms of possessions per game now. Both should help UVA. Goalie Greg Dutton hasn't been on top of his game, with a save percentage south of .500 after posting a .575 last season.
OSU also brings a revamped defense, with only Dominic Imbordino returning from last year. Partly as a result (I would imagine) OSU is way near the bottom of the NCAA charts in caused turnovers. Their results this year have been a mixed bag. Allowing only 10 goals to Denver, even in a loss, is pretty good - that's a season-low for the Pioneers. Allowing 8 goals to Detroit, one of the worst offensive teams in the country, is bad. That would be Detroit's second-highest total of the year, and Dutton was frankly outplayed by Detroit's goalie in that game.
On the good-guy side, Dom is slowly settling down the lineups, but not completely. Nick O'Reilly has become a fixture, and oftentimes the offense lives or dies with his quarterbacking, which he's doing a nice job of with 15 assists already this year. I still want to see Matt White play closer to the net and end this midfield experiment, but I've resigned myself to not getting my way. Otherwise, there isn't so much a first and second line of midfielders as there is a first and second group that gets shuffled up at times. We're getting there, though.
Faceoffs continue to scare me, even with Mick Parks winning at a .567 clip. The reason is that our wing play, if I may be so blunt, stinks. Chris LaPierre has been missing a ton of time and it shows. Our wings are always last to the play, it seems. I'd like to maybe solve that by putting the speedy Pat Harbeson on the wing, but Harbeson's no defender at all and only marginally skilled on offense. Besides, there's no guarantee he'd take any better an angle to the ball or be any better anticipating its motion than anyone else. Can't be much worse, though.
Still, as long as we can get some possession I'd like to think we can score on Ohio State. Maybe not, like, VMI-style, but UVA was doing well against a very stingy Cornell defense for a while. Continuing to gel should help, and the game is at home.
-- UVA on defense
It was probably fair to say that OSU was a one-man show last year. Attackman Logan Schuss had twice as many points as the next guy. It's much more diversified this year. Freshman Carter Brown has joined Schuss at the attack and played well. Along with top midfielder Jesse King, OSU finds itself with a much more efficient offense than they had last year. King and Brown are both scoring on 40% or more of their shots.
The battle between Schuss and Scott McWilliams should be a good one. McWilliams already has 20 caused turnovers, and while he's a little bit of a risk-taker and prone to getting beat, Schuss is one notch below the country's elite. Which McWilliams has now had his crack it in guarding Rob Pannell.
If there's an X-factor it might be midget midfielder Turner Evans, who missed the Buckeyes' first couple games. Evans is judicious with his shots, but he's been a sniper when he gets open for one, scoring six times on nine shots. As he's not very big, he has a tough time getting open on his own, but he'll probably have a short stick on him more often than not and that defender can't be caught out of place.
-- Outlook
A tough matchup awaits. Ohio State has tourney aspirations and this is one of their best chances to play their way in. And this is a year in which UVA is going to struggle to play at the level we're accustomed to seeing. Last year OSU jumped out to like a 6-1 lead before UVA got back into the game and eventually won. So don't be exactly blown away if we lose. That said, I'll be damned if I predict a loss to these bastards.
Final score: UVA 10, OSU 8
Friday, April 13, 2012
game preview: Duke
Date/Time: Friday, April 13; 6:00
TV: ESPNUVA
Record against the Blue Devils: 49-26
Last matchup: Duke 19, UVA 10; 4/22/11; Durham (ACC tournament)
Last game: UVA 15, UNC 10 (4/7); Duke 11, Marist 10 (4/7)
Efficiency stats:
Faceoff %:
UVA: 56.4%
Duke: 57.4%
Clearing %:
UVA: 89.6% (off.), 85.8% (def.)
Duke: 82.1% (off.), 86.7% (def.)
Scoring %:
UVA: 39.7% (off.), 29.4% (def.)
Duke: 37.8% (off.), 30.9% (def.)
O-rating:
UVA: 19.78 (#2)
Duke: 18.39 (#5)
D-rating:
UVA: 12.88 (#13)
Duke: 13.53 (#21)
It's one of those big weekends. Tomorrow, the Duke game, and the UNC baseball series begins as well. Saturday, more baseball and the spring football game. And then there's the Anthony Gill visit (about which Whitey Reid has some excellent info.) I suspect the Friday scheduling of the lacrosse game is because of the football game, which is too bad because I thought the combination football-lax extravaganza was a big step in the right direction toward the sort of all-out fun-time festival the spring football game should be. It rained last year, which sort of soured things, but I'd still enjoy seeing all these things treated as part of a larger whole instead of getting in the way of each other.
Tomorrow we'll talk spring football. Today, Duke. We got good news this afternoon when it was announced that Ryan Benincasa will be available after sitting out the part of the UNC game that happened after he was hit in the bean. It could have cost us the game; Benincasa looked as though he'd figured out something on UNC's R.G. Keenan and was winning a lot of faceoffs all the same way. Having him ready for Duke will be big.
-- UVA on offense
When not playing a man down, Duke has a fairly stout defense, a fact made even more impressive when you consider the streaky play of goalie Dan Wigrizer. On the whole, Wigrizer isn't a great goaltender, with only a .519 save percentage. And just when you think you're comfortable with that and you like the idea of Duke having a sieve for a netminder, Wigrizer stands on his head and stops like eight shots in a row. If you can get off a good shot, you can probably get it past Wigrizer....except when he's in one of his moods, and then he's a wall.
Duke's got some big guys at close-in defense, which is the sort of thing that gave us trouble at times against Hopkins. Michael Manley is an experienced senior, and the smallest of the bunch, too. He's not actually small, it's just that sophomores Henry Lobb and Chris Hipps are each 6'4". But the leader of the defense is LSM C.J. Costabile. Costabile also takes faceoffs (making him, as a long-stick guy, a rare breed in that department), and has earned a number of honors over his career, including being a finalist for the Lowe's Senior Class Award, which by the way Steele Stanwick is also a finalist for that so go vote for him if you don't want the Dookie to win.
So it's a solid defense they have, and it'd be even better if they were good at man-down defense. They have to play it a lot - Duke is one of the most heavily penalized teams in the country. They average five per game, and they're led by reserve defenseman Luke Duprey (by the way, he's 6'5") with 10. Mostly of the 60-second variety. Manley is a close second with nine. And when you get the ball, you just might score; Duke allows a 47% conversion rate on man-up chances. This translates to two goals a game.
I doubt we'll get a lot of one-on-one chances against Duke's close-in defense, given their size, and it won't be possible to force the ball into the doorstep if it's covered. Even less than usual, that is. Lord knows we try, sometimes. Duke's just too big for that. But the chances will come like they always have. They're good, but not fearsome - much like our other two ACC opponents. When we get man-up chances we must - and probably will - capitalize, and it's worth knowing that a lot of teams have scored on Duke that shouldn't be able to. Double-digit goals for Marist, Georgetown, Syracuse**, eight goals apiece for Brown and Penn - all teams with below-average O-ratings. So I expect to keep on finding the back of the net.
**It's really weird to be putting Syracuse in that group, but there they are, right between Delaware and Jacksonville in the O-rating department.
-- UVA on defense
We've got a pretty formidable offensive lineup. Duke is one of the few teams in the country that can match it. There's a trio of sophomore attackmen - Jordan Walsh, Christian Walsh, and Josh Dionne - that make a case for the most productive attack in the country, and senior midfielder Robert Rotanz has always been an extremely dangerous player too. Dionne and Wolf are the guys making the case that five-foot-single-digits is just fine; neither are 5'10" and between them they have 48 goals. Wolf in particular is dangerous; playing the X, behind the net, he has 24 goals and 20 assists. Rotanz is an excellent one-on-one dodger, and he leads the team with 26 goals.
Those four are the names you'll hear the most. Beyond that, it gets thin. There are capable players, but complementary parts at best; Justin Turri has 11 goals and the third starting middie, Jake Tripucka, has nine, but the thing is this: practically nobody after the top four has a shooting percentage above .300. Consider this: Rob Emery and Matt White put about the same percentage of their shots on net as do Turri and Tripucka, but the Duke players' shooting percentages are .212 and .205, respectively; Emery and White have a much more normal .352 and .382.
Still: the top four. And you'd think with all that offensive talent, Duke would have a scary man-up unit, but they're merely 11-for-51, a conversion percentage of .216. That's..... pretty bad, actually. Here's a little mental exercise: Duke's opponents have handed them 47 minutes' worth of penalties in 13 games. Duke themselves have committed 56.5 minutes' worth of penalties. Let's subtract those from the 780 minutes of game time they've played. That leaves 676.5 minutes. (I know that penalties usually end when a goal is scored; just bear with me.) Divide the 676.5 minutes in half to approximate the time that Duke spends on offense and we get 338.25.
So in our theoretical world, Duke has played 47 minutes a man-up and 338 minutes of even-strength offense. With 11 man-up goals, that's a goal for every 4:16 of man-up time. (We'll pretend you spend every second of man-up play on offense, even though you don't, because you should.) They've scored 138 even-strength goals, or one for every 2:27 of even-strength offense time. Duke gets worse when you give them an extra man. With as easy as it is to score on their man-down defense, theoretically, then, the best game plan is to spend the whole game trying to beat them into submission and hoping maybe they retaliate once in a while.
(In case you're wondering, the same tortured mathematical calisthenics when performed on UVA's stats give us a goal for every 1:44 of man-up time and a goal for every 2:22 of even-strength offensive time.)
This is kind of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, of course - obviously I don't want to actually break their players over our sticks in hopes of earning a parade to the penalty box. I want to break them legally. The point here is that Duke probably needs a new special-teams coach.
-- Outlook
It's Senior Night, and it's Duke; you shouldn't need any more reason to want to win by 13. In the standings there is none; thanks to the way the tiebreakers work, the ACC tourney pairings are already set. We got UNC, Duke has Maryland. Duke lost to Maryland in the regular season, but I don't see it happening again, which means there's a decent likelihood we'll match up in another week's time, same teams, same field, just like last year. That's no reason to look ahead to a rematch that might not even happen, of course, but we lost twice to these guys last year, and we can't flip the script without winning the first one. I know these Dookie bastards are our kryptonite year in and year out, but we've got Steele Stanwick and Chris Bocklet making opposing fans go "please hurry the eff up and graduate" and a machine of an offense and I'll be damned if I predict this team to lose.
-- Final score: [redacted to appease the fickle lacrosse gods]**
*************************************************
-- Did I mention Steele Stanwick? I did, but I must again. He is mere tenths of a percentage point ahead of Costabile the Dukie, and trailing two guys from Siena(!) and Ohio State. Siena has three fans and Ohio State is the devil. Steele Stanwick : lacrosse :: Danny Hultzen : baseball. VOTE FOR HIM DAMMIT
-- This was too fun to wait til Monday's weekend review: UVA got a shout on the Colbert Report the other day. We are a school that is Doing It Right, at least in the mind of Colbert's smart-sounding interviewee, who was not kidding even though Colbert usually is. We're also the only school that Colbert heard on the Doing It Right list and earned a cheer instead of a snarky reply upon mention. (Colbert's wife is a Hoo. He is not stupid.) Click, then, to hear Wahoowa, Stephen Colbert style.
**OK, OK....13-12. Shhh!
Monday, April 9, 2012
weekend review
I've been afraid to start writing this because the biggest news of the weekend might break AT ANY MOMENT. (AAAAAAAAA) I'm sure what'll happen is, I'll have this nice big writeup about how we're still waiting on pins and needles for point guard T.J. McConnell's imminent decision between UVA and Arizona, and by the time I get done writing it I'll have to erase it and start over.
Yes, we're still waiting, despite some Arizona site (Point Guard U, they're called) jumping the gun and reporting a McConnell commitment to the Wildcats late last night. No such commitment has yet occurred, of course. These people at Point Guard U have been more or less "reporting" McConnell will be a Cat for a couple weeks now, so there's no good reason to consider them the definitive source.
So we wait. Arizona is full enough on scholarship guys that they've stopped recruiting a late 2012 guy by the name of Amadeo Della Valle, but not so full that there's no longer any room for McConnell. (Sean Miller isn't that dumb.) If this didn't happen to be a guy whose family knew Miller from way back, it might already be over by now and we'd have us a point guard. But for now....we wait.
***************************************************
And we talk lacrosse. The Hoos opened one up on North Carolina this week, in what I think was the best three quarters of defense they've played all season. (Not so much the fourth - they looked a little complacent and it's fair to also mention that the offense plays differently when it's desperate. And being down by 7 qualifies as desperate.) I wasn't kidding when I said UNC's offense was dangerous, and the Hoos held them to five goals in the first three quarters.
That means a yeoman effort by the defense, of course, and also by Rob Fortunato. (Let's just come out and say right now what we've all been thinking but not wanting to say: Fortunato has been better than Adam Ghitelman at stopping shots. Unlike with Ghitelman, I'm still a little nervous when Fortunato makes a pass longer than about fifteen yards, but Fortunato has been damn impressive in net. He's making saves that I don't think Ghitelman would've.) But the guys I want to single out this time are the SSDMs: Chris LaPierre and Bobby Hill. An excellent game by both, and Rob Emery has been playing a little two-way ball as well and showed us why when he went coast-to-coast for an early transition goal.
The offense hummed like the proverbial well-oiled machine. Steele Stanwick racked up the numbers as usual, but nevertheless the game wasn't all Stanwick all the time; in fact it was Matt White who made a Stanwickesque pass to Bocklet for the first man-up goal. Offense came from everywhere, and it broke down the UNC resistance; their goalie Rastivo often made the first save but couldn't make the second one.
I think - I am not 100% sure but I think - that we have locked in another date with Carolina in the ACC tournament. If I'm right, it works like this:
-- If we [redacted to appease the fickle lacrosse gods] on Friday, we would be the #1 seed with a 3-0 record, and they'd have to apply a three-way tiebreaker to deal with the 1-2 teams down below. I think the applicable tiebreaker will be goal differential in games between the tied teams, in which Maryland is +2 and the other two are -1. That would give Maryland the two seed, and Duke beat UNC so they're the three, and UNC the four.
-- If we lose to Duke on Friday, then we'd be the two seed, with us and Duke at 2-1 and UNC and Maryland at 1-2. And UNC beat Maryland.
I could be wrong about this, but I'll let you quote me anyway.
***************************************************
In the baseball world, we watched a thrilling sweep, particularly on Sunday. Saturday was a thing of beauty, with Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera each going yard (and then going yard again), but Sunday was the real happy time, as the good guys twice came back from a multiple-run deficit in crunch time to broom away the hated.....oops. You want Virginia baseball. I'm kind of puffed-up and happy about the Tigers, too.
Well, it's still going on, as I type this, because of the TV schedule, but it started off just fine. A much-needed series win against Wake Forest is already in the bag, and the Hoos are up 3-2 in the not-rubber game as I write. We'll either be 9-6 or 8-7 in an hour or so, and 9-6 would be interesting because that's the same record as UNC, who happens to be the next opponent. A huge series.
For all the angst over losing three games in Tallahassee, it's worth it to remember that a break or two the other way might've sent us home with a series win - and FSU is now 14-1. They're, uh, good.
But they're also in the other division. Now I don't want to get expectations too high, but finishing off the win tonight and then a good result against UNC could put the Hoos in an outside position to steal the division title from current leader Miami. But a lot would have to go right and I'm not getting my hopes up. Yet.
The bottom line is that a regional 2 seed is still the minimum expectation. The main question remains the bullpen. Artie Lewicki was pulled in the fourth inning tonight, and he's never going to be a guy who goes eight innings anyway, which means they'll be in for plenty of innings in the upcoming weeks. They were excellent yesterday, limiting Wake to 1 run all day after Silverstein was pulled in the fifth. In the end I don't think this team has the pitching to pull off an extended tournament run (meaning: make it to Omaha) but that's a concern for a month from now, not right now.
A final interesting note: this week's Wednesday opponent is George Washington. Perhaps this year one of their players will get to experience Davenport Field from the perspective of a baserunner.
Look at that, I made it all the way to the end of the post and T.J. McConnell hasn't made (or at least announced) his decision. All my worrying for nothing. The conventional wisdom is that the longer it takes after the Arizona visit is a good thing for UVA. I see no reason to question the conventional wisdom. It means the Charlottesville visit stuck. We shall see.
Yes, we're still waiting, despite some Arizona site (Point Guard U, they're called) jumping the gun and reporting a McConnell commitment to the Wildcats late last night. No such commitment has yet occurred, of course. These people at Point Guard U have been more or less "reporting" McConnell will be a Cat for a couple weeks now, so there's no good reason to consider them the definitive source.
So we wait. Arizona is full enough on scholarship guys that they've stopped recruiting a late 2012 guy by the name of Amadeo Della Valle, but not so full that there's no longer any room for McConnell. (Sean Miller isn't that dumb.) If this didn't happen to be a guy whose family knew Miller from way back, it might already be over by now and we'd have us a point guard. But for now....we wait.
***************************************************
And we talk lacrosse. The Hoos opened one up on North Carolina this week, in what I think was the best three quarters of defense they've played all season. (Not so much the fourth - they looked a little complacent and it's fair to also mention that the offense plays differently when it's desperate. And being down by 7 qualifies as desperate.) I wasn't kidding when I said UNC's offense was dangerous, and the Hoos held them to five goals in the first three quarters.
That means a yeoman effort by the defense, of course, and also by Rob Fortunato. (Let's just come out and say right now what we've all been thinking but not wanting to say: Fortunato has been better than Adam Ghitelman at stopping shots. Unlike with Ghitelman, I'm still a little nervous when Fortunato makes a pass longer than about fifteen yards, but Fortunato has been damn impressive in net. He's making saves that I don't think Ghitelman would've.) But the guys I want to single out this time are the SSDMs: Chris LaPierre and Bobby Hill. An excellent game by both, and Rob Emery has been playing a little two-way ball as well and showed us why when he went coast-to-coast for an early transition goal.
The offense hummed like the proverbial well-oiled machine. Steele Stanwick racked up the numbers as usual, but nevertheless the game wasn't all Stanwick all the time; in fact it was Matt White who made a Stanwickesque pass to Bocklet for the first man-up goal. Offense came from everywhere, and it broke down the UNC resistance; their goalie Rastivo often made the first save but couldn't make the second one.
I think - I am not 100% sure but I think - that we have locked in another date with Carolina in the ACC tournament. If I'm right, it works like this:
-- If we [redacted to appease the fickle lacrosse gods] on Friday, we would be the #1 seed with a 3-0 record, and they'd have to apply a three-way tiebreaker to deal with the 1-2 teams down below. I think the applicable tiebreaker will be goal differential in games between the tied teams, in which Maryland is +2 and the other two are -1. That would give Maryland the two seed, and Duke beat UNC so they're the three, and UNC the four.
-- If we lose to Duke on Friday, then we'd be the two seed, with us and Duke at 2-1 and UNC and Maryland at 1-2. And UNC beat Maryland.
I could be wrong about this, but I'll let you quote me anyway.
***************************************************
In the baseball world, we watched a thrilling sweep, particularly on Sunday. Saturday was a thing of beauty, with Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera each going yard (and then going yard again), but Sunday was the real happy time, as the good guys twice came back from a multiple-run deficit in crunch time to broom away the hated.....oops. You want Virginia baseball. I'm kind of puffed-up and happy about the Tigers, too.
Well, it's still going on, as I type this, because of the TV schedule, but it started off just fine. A much-needed series win against Wake Forest is already in the bag, and the Hoos are up 3-2 in the not-rubber game as I write. We'll either be 9-6 or 8-7 in an hour or so, and 9-6 would be interesting because that's the same record as UNC, who happens to be the next opponent. A huge series.
For all the angst over losing three games in Tallahassee, it's worth it to remember that a break or two the other way might've sent us home with a series win - and FSU is now 14-1. They're, uh, good.
But they're also in the other division. Now I don't want to get expectations too high, but finishing off the win tonight and then a good result against UNC could put the Hoos in an outside position to steal the division title from current leader Miami. But a lot would have to go right and I'm not getting my hopes up. Yet.
The bottom line is that a regional 2 seed is still the minimum expectation. The main question remains the bullpen. Artie Lewicki was pulled in the fourth inning tonight, and he's never going to be a guy who goes eight innings anyway, which means they'll be in for plenty of innings in the upcoming weeks. They were excellent yesterday, limiting Wake to 1 run all day after Silverstein was pulled in the fifth. In the end I don't think this team has the pitching to pull off an extended tournament run (meaning: make it to Omaha) but that's a concern for a month from now, not right now.
A final interesting note: this week's Wednesday opponent is George Washington. Perhaps this year one of their players will get to experience Davenport Field from the perspective of a baserunner.
Look at that, I made it all the way to the end of the post and T.J. McConnell hasn't made (or at least announced) his decision. All my worrying for nothing. The conventional wisdom is that the longer it takes after the Arizona visit is a good thing for UVA. I see no reason to question the conventional wisdom. It means the Charlottesville visit stuck. We shall see.
Monday, April 2, 2012
weekend review
Sunday's baseball game was a marathon producing a very disappointing result. But never mind that. It was a good weekend because it's always a good weekend when we beat Maryland, which doesn't lose to Virginia, except for most of the time. So yes, lacrosse is this week's top subject of conversation.
UVA looked great at either end of the game and not so good in the middle. And I think I know why: they didn't listen when I said "patience" and then they did. You might've noticed by now that this team is really good at finding open guys five feet from the net, because Steele Stanwick is good at finding open guys five feet from the net and Chris Bocklet is really good at being that open guy. Sometimes these goals they score are just, things of beauty.
But sometimes they try and force the beauty into ugly spots. And that's where the turnovers happen. The defense isn't always screwed-up and out of position, and when the defense is nice and tight around the net, you can't force passes in there no matter your talent level. Regardless, they try, sometimes, and that's one reason we lost the Hopkins game and why Maryland was up two goals midway through the third on Saturday.
That said, excluded from the forcing-it category is Stanwick's twisting, falling-down, double-teamed goal in the fourth, which is the kind of play that sticks in the mind of a Tewaaraton voter when it's time to fill out the ballot. Oh yes, he's in the running again, there's no doubt about that. Colgate's Peter Baum already has 42 goals and could finish the season with 60-some, but Colgate has to make the tourney - as we've seen, the voters care about your postseason exploits. Stanwick leads the country in assists with 33 and has 14 goals as well, which lands him fourth in the country in PPG. If Stanwick won, he'd be the first men's recipient to win the award two years in a row; Cuse's Mike Powell was the first to win two but sandwiched in between was our own Chris Rotelli.
Folks are also saying the fourth-quarter run was precipitated by inserting Matt White into the lineup and that hopefully it means White will get more playing time in favor of Owen Van Arsdale, whose hot start has cooled considerably. And yeah they're not wrong, but then again White has started all ten games. It's not like he's not out there. He's just playing midfield, when his natural spot is really attack. If you want a real suggestion: Move White to attack, OVA to the bench, and put Ryan Tucker on the first-line midfield. Tucker's got a gun. So does Rob Emery, and they'll be playing together in next year's midfield so might as well get them some quality time on the same field.
Next week is North Carolina, who I was rooting for last night against Hopkins so they'd be all fat, happy, and content this coming Saturday. Two weeks from now is Duke, and then the ACC tourney, and by the way here are your tourney scenarios now that we've gotten past Maryland:
-- Beat both UNC and Duke: #1 seed (which would be appropriate and correct as we are the hosts), play either UNC or Duke, I don't know what the tiebreakers are past goal differential and those two teams would be #3 and #4 in some order.
-- Beat UNC, lose to Duke: #2 seed, play Carolina, which beat Maryland and would earn the tiebreaker over them.
-- Lose to UNC, beat Duke: #2 seed, play Maryland, who beat Duke and so would be the #3 seed.
-- Lose both games: #3 seed, play Carolina, who lost to Duke and so would be the #2 seed.
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So baseball also happened. What else happened is that UVA fans are officially going to sweat any lead in the late innings that's smaller than seven runs. After taking a 3-0 lead on Sunday, the Hoos gradually pissed away the whole thing until they were down 5-3; a ninth-inning comeback made it 6-5, and then, one half-inning away from finally winning a series in Raleigh, UVA did not even register one out en route to handing the game back to the Wolfpack. (OK, technically, they did. It was a sacrifice bunt. It's not like the pitching actually caused that to happen.)
I think it proved me rather prophetic, actually; these two teams are so closely matched it's unreal. It just so happens NC State has a better bullpen. As do most teams these days, unfortunately.
The best game - and not just because we won it - was definitely Saturday's, where the teams' two actual best pitchers matched up. Carlos Rodon is gonna be scary. He's scary now. And Branden Kline matched up pitch for pitch, except for a couple mistakes that ended up in the trees. It was the State bullpen that collapsed on Saturday; they were handed a tie game after a lightning delay forced out the starters, and UVA came through.
Friday was really only notable for Brian O'Connor's ejection, which was a surprise because BOC always brings his indoor voice to umpire arguments. It started off that way on Friday, too, until a button was pushed someway, somehow, and O'Connor went all Earl Weaver on the guy, except for the dust-kicking. If it was an effort to fire up the team, it didn't work, but I haven't gotten the impression BOC is the kind of guy to resort to that kind of trick. I think the umpire said something he didn't like.
So I had yet to see that happen, until this weekend, and I got to see something else I hadn't yet seen with my own eyes: Keith Werman behind the plate. He's got kind of a Peter Rowen thing going on:
He's also a pretty natural-looking catcher (except for the build), although I didn't see his basestealer-nabbing skills. NC State didn't run on him. (They scurred.)
Next week is a home series against Wake Forest, which is a halfway decent team. Even so, we should be disappointed with anything less than a series win. No moral victories there.
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In the world of basketball, it's a dead period right now until Thursday, so no contacting recruits, which also means no contacting all those potential transfers we're trying to bring in. T.J. McConnell, formerly of Duquesne, is officially down to either Arizona or UVA, and will check out Tucson pretty soon. The downside: McConnell's family supposedly knows Arizona's coach Sean Miller from small times. The plus side: Arizona is located in Tucson.
McConnell would be a prize catch. Another possibility: Rice transfer Dylan Ennis, who made the CUSA all-freshman team. In the big-man theater, Anthony Gill will request his release** (or has done so) from South Carolina, and this is obviously a thing because of this line from his official bio at South Carolina: "Choose (sic) South Carolina over Virginia and Wake Forest."
**Pay no attention to the line about tampering; it's a throwin by a pissed-off SC fan angry that we might take one of their best players.
Edit: RRRGGHHHH DAMMMMITTT I completely forgot to even mention this, which is loooonnngg overdue.
UVA looked great at either end of the game and not so good in the middle. And I think I know why: they didn't listen when I said "patience" and then they did. You might've noticed by now that this team is really good at finding open guys five feet from the net, because Steele Stanwick is good at finding open guys five feet from the net and Chris Bocklet is really good at being that open guy. Sometimes these goals they score are just, things of beauty.
But sometimes they try and force the beauty into ugly spots. And that's where the turnovers happen. The defense isn't always screwed-up and out of position, and when the defense is nice and tight around the net, you can't force passes in there no matter your talent level. Regardless, they try, sometimes, and that's one reason we lost the Hopkins game and why Maryland was up two goals midway through the third on Saturday.
That said, excluded from the forcing-it category is Stanwick's twisting, falling-down, double-teamed goal in the fourth, which is the kind of play that sticks in the mind of a Tewaaraton voter when it's time to fill out the ballot. Oh yes, he's in the running again, there's no doubt about that. Colgate's Peter Baum already has 42 goals and could finish the season with 60-some, but Colgate has to make the tourney - as we've seen, the voters care about your postseason exploits. Stanwick leads the country in assists with 33 and has 14 goals as well, which lands him fourth in the country in PPG. If Stanwick won, he'd be the first men's recipient to win the award two years in a row; Cuse's Mike Powell was the first to win two but sandwiched in between was our own Chris Rotelli.
Folks are also saying the fourth-quarter run was precipitated by inserting Matt White into the lineup and that hopefully it means White will get more playing time in favor of Owen Van Arsdale, whose hot start has cooled considerably. And yeah they're not wrong, but then again White has started all ten games. It's not like he's not out there. He's just playing midfield, when his natural spot is really attack. If you want a real suggestion: Move White to attack, OVA to the bench, and put Ryan Tucker on the first-line midfield. Tucker's got a gun. So does Rob Emery, and they'll be playing together in next year's midfield so might as well get them some quality time on the same field.
Next week is North Carolina, who I was rooting for last night against Hopkins so they'd be all fat, happy, and content this coming Saturday. Two weeks from now is Duke, and then the ACC tourney, and by the way here are your tourney scenarios now that we've gotten past Maryland:
-- Beat both UNC and Duke: #1 seed (which would be appropriate and correct as we are the hosts), play either UNC or Duke, I don't know what the tiebreakers are past goal differential and those two teams would be #3 and #4 in some order.
-- Beat UNC, lose to Duke: #2 seed, play Carolina, which beat Maryland and would earn the tiebreaker over them.
-- Lose to UNC, beat Duke: #2 seed, play Maryland, who beat Duke and so would be the #3 seed.
-- Lose both games: #3 seed, play Carolina, who lost to Duke and so would be the #2 seed.
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So baseball also happened. What else happened is that UVA fans are officially going to sweat any lead in the late innings that's smaller than seven runs. After taking a 3-0 lead on Sunday, the Hoos gradually pissed away the whole thing until they were down 5-3; a ninth-inning comeback made it 6-5, and then, one half-inning away from finally winning a series in Raleigh, UVA did not even register one out en route to handing the game back to the Wolfpack. (OK, technically, they did. It was a sacrifice bunt. It's not like the pitching actually caused that to happen.)
I think it proved me rather prophetic, actually; these two teams are so closely matched it's unreal. It just so happens NC State has a better bullpen. As do most teams these days, unfortunately.
The best game - and not just because we won it - was definitely Saturday's, where the teams' two actual best pitchers matched up. Carlos Rodon is gonna be scary. He's scary now. And Branden Kline matched up pitch for pitch, except for a couple mistakes that ended up in the trees. It was the State bullpen that collapsed on Saturday; they were handed a tie game after a lightning delay forced out the starters, and UVA came through.
Friday was really only notable for Brian O'Connor's ejection, which was a surprise because BOC always brings his indoor voice to umpire arguments. It started off that way on Friday, too, until a button was pushed someway, somehow, and O'Connor went all Earl Weaver on the guy, except for the dust-kicking. If it was an effort to fire up the team, it didn't work, but I haven't gotten the impression BOC is the kind of guy to resort to that kind of trick. I think the umpire said something he didn't like.
So I had yet to see that happen, until this weekend, and I got to see something else I hadn't yet seen with my own eyes: Keith Werman behind the plate. He's got kind of a Peter Rowen thing going on:
He's also a pretty natural-looking catcher (except for the build), although I didn't see his basestealer-nabbing skills. NC State didn't run on him. (They scurred.)
Next week is a home series against Wake Forest, which is a halfway decent team. Even so, we should be disappointed with anything less than a series win. No moral victories there.
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In the world of basketball, it's a dead period right now until Thursday, so no contacting recruits, which also means no contacting all those potential transfers we're trying to bring in. T.J. McConnell, formerly of Duquesne, is officially down to either Arizona or UVA, and will check out Tucson pretty soon. The downside: McConnell's family supposedly knows Arizona's coach Sean Miller from small times. The plus side: Arizona is located in Tucson.
McConnell would be a prize catch. Another possibility: Rice transfer Dylan Ennis, who made the CUSA all-freshman team. In the big-man theater, Anthony Gill will request his release** (or has done so) from South Carolina, and this is obviously a thing because of this line from his official bio at South Carolina: "Choose (sic) South Carolina over Virginia and Wake Forest."
**Pay no attention to the line about tampering; it's a throwin by a pissed-off SC fan angry that we might take one of their best players.
Edit: RRRGGHHHH DAMMMMITTT I completely forgot to even mention this, which is loooonnngg overdue.
Monday, May 16, 2011
comeback to the future
Good enough to bump normal weekend review programming to tomorrow. That's how good the lax game against Bucknell was yesterday.
There've been bigger comebacks in the history of sport, sure enough, and it's not going to qualify as one of history's favorite games when a superpower in a down year scrapes out a win against a small-fry, high-school-sized school having its best year ever in lacrosse. Admittedly I even felt a little bad about it, since you know Bucknell fans will remember that one a lot longer than we will. But not bad, like, "I wish we hadn't done that," bad like, "I wish we had done that to Maryland."
Still, it qualifies as one of my favorite games. Whenever you reach the point where you are convinced you're going to lose, and you don't lose, that's "epic comeback" level. It's a fuzzier feeling about the game than it would've been had UVA blown a big lead and then rescued the win in OT. It shouldn't be, but it is. Being down 10-6 is a pretty bleak situation, but that's what you have superstars for, and Steele Stanwick and Chris Bocklet got busy, put the offense on their shoulders, and got to work. When they were done working UVA had only its second lead of the game, and if you're going to lead just twice in a game, overtime is a fairly good choice for one of those.
So UVA survives a dangerous first-round matchup that many said they couldn't and looked like they wouldn't, and now gets to jump on board the "nobody believes in us" motivation train. It's a hackneyed motivator that college kids are real suckers for, often to the point of obnoxiousness, but dammit it works. Cornell is the next opponent as we run the gauntlet of the 'nells to try and get to the championship, and the fortunes of both our teams have been awfully divergent since last we met. (Thank God Cornell turned out to be any good because without them rising to near the top of the heap, maybe we don't host that first-round game.) Cornell will be righteously motivated by losing to UVA in March, and they have the best player in the country, but the combination of our talent with an underdog us-vs.-the-world attitude could be a deadly combo. Other than Maryland we're the lowest remaining seed in the field (upset bids went nowhere all weekend), but if I were Cornell, there're several higher-seeded teams I'd rather be staring at this weekend.
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- That said, there's a laundry list of things that need to get better next weekend. Things that aren't game-killers against Bucknell but will get you destroyed against Cornell and other top-level teams. Defensive pressure was lame most of the day, even at distances 12 yards and shorter. Short-stick defense was especially poor.
- Speaking of short-stick defense, any questions as to whether reinstating Rhamel Bratton might have a negative effect on chemistry ought to disappear now. They were legit after the Penn game; now it's clear that even if "chemistry" takes a hit with him out there (and I suspect it will not) it doesn't outweigh the necessity of having him on defense. There was only one SSDM I was happy with yesterday (more on that in a bit) and having Rhamel's athleticism and defensive smarts will probably be critical against Cornell. If Rhamel's gotten his stuff together and is ready for reinstatement then I want to see him at SSDM for most of the game, and put in on offense sometimes to mix up the looks we throw at Cornell. And please don't announce it until 11:59 AM on Saturday.
- The aforementioned good-playin' SSDM is Blake Riley, who's been doing a great job of making his presence felt in the past few games. It was Riley's aggressiveness that led to the Bucknell turnover in OT: taking advantage of his man slipping to the turf, checking him, and scooping the resulting ground ball. Riley also led the team in GBs for the game. The rest of the short-stick defense was unwatchable.
- No, seriously: Steele friggin' Stanwick. I hope he's not actually healthy yet because eight points is ridiculous and eight points on a bad wheel is unbelievable. Matt White scored the game-winner because Bucknell's defenders were deathly afraid of Stanwick having the ball, and his feeds to Bocklet were precise and too pretty for the naked eye. They required replay to appreciate.
- Much is being made of the referee's decision to award UVA the ball after a Bucknell player heaved it in the direction of the empty net on their late clearing attempt when UVA deployed the 10-man ride and sent Adam Ghitelman out of the net. Was it a pass? A shot? A Bucknell player was closer to the end line but was he actually closer to the ball? Watching it live I assumed it was a shot and that the referee's angle led him to wrongly believe UVA was closer to it as it went out. I reflected for all of half a second on the injustices of refereeing and another half-second on those times we get scrooged instead. And then I stopped worrying about it. Upon replay it's actually really hard to tell who's closer to the ball, but the Bucknell guy was positioned such that if he was closer, than the ball was so far away from the net that it couldn't plausibly have been a shot in the first place. It sort of demonstrates an inherent problem with the rule about shots going out of bounds, but on final reflection I decided it was a 51-49 kind of call that the referee got right but couldn't have been greatly faulted for getting wrong. And the larger issue, if I were a Bucknell fan, is that it shouldn't have been in the ref's hands at all because putting the ball in the air like that was a really bad idea.
- In fact, it's really hard not to acknowledge the role that Bucknell's awful, awful decision-making played in this comeback. Much like UVA against UNC, they should've been sitting on their lead and not shooting with two and three minutes to play. It came back to bite them. And most of their shots were at defended nets.
- Even so, the very gambly style - 10-man ride, double teams with two and a half, three minutes to go - was a lot of fun to watch. Largely because it worked, but hey.
- Bring on Cornell.
- That last bullet will probably bring on the jinx instead, but whatever.
There've been bigger comebacks in the history of sport, sure enough, and it's not going to qualify as one of history's favorite games when a superpower in a down year scrapes out a win against a small-fry, high-school-sized school having its best year ever in lacrosse. Admittedly I even felt a little bad about it, since you know Bucknell fans will remember that one a lot longer than we will. But not bad, like, "I wish we hadn't done that," bad like, "I wish we had done that to Maryland."
Still, it qualifies as one of my favorite games. Whenever you reach the point where you are convinced you're going to lose, and you don't lose, that's "epic comeback" level. It's a fuzzier feeling about the game than it would've been had UVA blown a big lead and then rescued the win in OT. It shouldn't be, but it is. Being down 10-6 is a pretty bleak situation, but that's what you have superstars for, and Steele Stanwick and Chris Bocklet got busy, put the offense on their shoulders, and got to work. When they were done working UVA had only its second lead of the game, and if you're going to lead just twice in a game, overtime is a fairly good choice for one of those.
So UVA survives a dangerous first-round matchup that many said they couldn't and looked like they wouldn't, and now gets to jump on board the "nobody believes in us" motivation train. It's a hackneyed motivator that college kids are real suckers for, often to the point of obnoxiousness, but dammit it works. Cornell is the next opponent as we run the gauntlet of the 'nells to try and get to the championship, and the fortunes of both our teams have been awfully divergent since last we met. (Thank God Cornell turned out to be any good because without them rising to near the top of the heap, maybe we don't host that first-round game.) Cornell will be righteously motivated by losing to UVA in March, and they have the best player in the country, but the combination of our talent with an underdog us-vs.-the-world attitude could be a deadly combo. Other than Maryland we're the lowest remaining seed in the field (upset bids went nowhere all weekend), but if I were Cornell, there're several higher-seeded teams I'd rather be staring at this weekend.
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- That said, there's a laundry list of things that need to get better next weekend. Things that aren't game-killers against Bucknell but will get you destroyed against Cornell and other top-level teams. Defensive pressure was lame most of the day, even at distances 12 yards and shorter. Short-stick defense was especially poor.
- Speaking of short-stick defense, any questions as to whether reinstating Rhamel Bratton might have a negative effect on chemistry ought to disappear now. They were legit after the Penn game; now it's clear that even if "chemistry" takes a hit with him out there (and I suspect it will not) it doesn't outweigh the necessity of having him on defense. There was only one SSDM I was happy with yesterday (more on that in a bit) and having Rhamel's athleticism and defensive smarts will probably be critical against Cornell. If Rhamel's gotten his stuff together and is ready for reinstatement then I want to see him at SSDM for most of the game, and put in on offense sometimes to mix up the looks we throw at Cornell. And please don't announce it until 11:59 AM on Saturday.
- The aforementioned good-playin' SSDM is Blake Riley, who's been doing a great job of making his presence felt in the past few games. It was Riley's aggressiveness that led to the Bucknell turnover in OT: taking advantage of his man slipping to the turf, checking him, and scooping the resulting ground ball. Riley also led the team in GBs for the game. The rest of the short-stick defense was unwatchable.
- No, seriously: Steele friggin' Stanwick. I hope he's not actually healthy yet because eight points is ridiculous and eight points on a bad wheel is unbelievable. Matt White scored the game-winner because Bucknell's defenders were deathly afraid of Stanwick having the ball, and his feeds to Bocklet were precise and too pretty for the naked eye. They required replay to appreciate.
- Much is being made of the referee's decision to award UVA the ball after a Bucknell player heaved it in the direction of the empty net on their late clearing attempt when UVA deployed the 10-man ride and sent Adam Ghitelman out of the net. Was it a pass? A shot? A Bucknell player was closer to the end line but was he actually closer to the ball? Watching it live I assumed it was a shot and that the referee's angle led him to wrongly believe UVA was closer to it as it went out. I reflected for all of half a second on the injustices of refereeing and another half-second on those times we get scrooged instead. And then I stopped worrying about it. Upon replay it's actually really hard to tell who's closer to the ball, but the Bucknell guy was positioned such that if he was closer, than the ball was so far away from the net that it couldn't plausibly have been a shot in the first place. It sort of demonstrates an inherent problem with the rule about shots going out of bounds, but on final reflection I decided it was a 51-49 kind of call that the referee got right but couldn't have been greatly faulted for getting wrong. And the larger issue, if I were a Bucknell fan, is that it shouldn't have been in the ref's hands at all because putting the ball in the air like that was a really bad idea.
- In fact, it's really hard not to acknowledge the role that Bucknell's awful, awful decision-making played in this comeback. Much like UVA against UNC, they should've been sitting on their lead and not shooting with two and three minutes to play. It came back to bite them. And most of their shots were at defended nets.
- Even so, the very gambly style - 10-man ride, double teams with two and a half, three minutes to go - was a lot of fun to watch. Largely because it worked, but hey.
- Bring on Cornell.
- That last bullet will probably bring on the jinx instead, but whatever.
Monday, April 18, 2011
weekend review
I like to get the bad stuff out of the way early, which means lacrosse goes first today. Want to know what's so thoroughly frustrating about this team? Besides the brainfartitude, there are two huge, gaping flaws in the makeup of this team that prevent it from reaching its potential, which is frankly enormous.
Flaw #1: the obvious inability to win a faceoff. This frustrates me to no end, not least because I'm about to harp on the problems at the faceoff X after a game in which UVA's faceoff men won 15 of 26 for 57%. That's not half bad. It's pretty good. But you know what makes my head explode? I've been thinking for a while that Ryan Benincasa should take the majority of the faceoffs, Garrett Ince and Brian McDermott should come in only rarely, if ever, and Chris LaPierre should be the second guy for a change of pace every so often And then Benincasa wins zero of five against Duke and Ince and McDermott combine for 71%. I've mentioned before that I think the faceoff problems are basically coaching problems because of the inordinate amount of faceoff violations called on our team, and I think the total lack of consistency also points to coaching.
Flaw #2 is that there is but one player on the offensive side of the field - Steele Stanwick - who can make his teammates better. And he sat out to rest his foot on Saturday. For my own sanity I'll just assume that Coach Starsia did that because this game didn't matter half of what the next one did and he wanted that ace in the hole he could throw in next week to change the game around....and not because Stanwick's injury got worse somehow. I hope to hell not.
This is partly why I have that nagging feeling that the end-of-career fade is beginning for Starsia. For the last decade UVA has had a star attackman that gathers assists nearly as fast as he gathers goals. Right now that's Stanwick. In the past it's been Danny Glading, or Ben Rubeor, or Matt Ward, or whatever. They score and they help their teammates score. When Stanwick leaves after next season, who'll that be? Stanwick's talent was immediately evident as a freshman. You can always tell who the heir apparent is. Not this time. It's not Matt White or Rob Emery; the former has disappointed this year and the latter looks like a nice complementary player along the lines of Colin Briggs. I dunno, maybe I'm overreacting and the reason nobody's really emerged is because of so many upperclassmen in the lineup, but I doubt it; Stanwick and even Chris Bocklet, not to mention the players of the past, played their way in and made themselves indispensible.
But I digress. Two major flaws in this team and we still only lose to Duke and Syracuse by two goals. The talent is there to blow the competition out of the water. But there are some missing elements. It's like a Corvette with four-cylinder engine.
It doesn't help that we drive it with the parking brake on and the gas cap hanging off. The silly mistakes are still there. They weren't as obvious as against UNC, but there they were. Example: Shamel Bratton jogging down the field after receiving a nice outlet pass following a turnover and setting up the offense. Fine, except....you're Shamel Bratton and nobody's covering you! Jog? Shamel should've been sprinting downfield and ripping a shot at a corner of the net. If it misses, fine....then go set up the offense. Instead, Shamel jogged across midfield and the team proceeded to huck the ball around the box for thirty seconds before lobbing a beach ball at Duke's net, which of course was saved. I'm not questioning Shamel's effort here, I'm questioning the recognition. The Brattons are the kings of "argh don't do th.....YES!" Would've been the time for it.
So as a punishment for losing to Duke like we always do, we get to play Duke again on Friday. Let's hope Steele Stanwick is the difference. I'm not brimming with optimism here.
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Fortunately, there's a cure for that: the baseball team. As punishment for beating our lacrosse team on Saturday, the baseball team beat Duke twice on Sunday - first by ripping their hearts out when they thought they had a real chance to steal a win, and then by stomping on it to the tune of 18-4 in the second game.
Friday was easy, of course, at least after the first three innings. Danny Hultzen served up seven innings of Danny freakin' Hultzen, although the early going was a little rocky while the UVA hitters tried to figure out how to get to Duke's soft-tossing lefty Dillon Haviland. Eventually they figured that out and before you knew it, it was 10-0, which is how the game ended. Shutout woo.
Sunday's game 1 was quite the pitchers' duel. UVA scratched out two runs against Dennis O'Grady and Duke did the same on a two-run double off of closer Kline, in relief of Tyler Wilson and his disgustingly efficient outing. Wilson took the blame for the runs but it wasn't fair the way he was pitching. Duke then brought scheduled third game starter Marcus Stroman in to finish it up.
Not a bad move, by the way. A few observers criticized the move but I liked it. For Duke, I mean. With Duke's miserable pitching staff you don't look for two of three against UVA. You look to steal one where you can get it, and so they went all-in and brought Stroman in, figuring that because he's a starter and the best pitcher they have, he could work some long innings in what you had to assumed would be an extra-inning game, and outlast UVA's bullpen while Duke worked on manufacturing a run. Stroman throws 95 and has the control of a kamikaze pilot. He plunked the first two batters he faced, which appeared to draw a warning from the home-plate ump - "one more of those and you're gone" is my bet, because UVA's third batter walked on four straight pitches that were so far outside they'd have been behind a hitter in the other batter's box. Bases loaded, none out, and UVA managed to score not even once. Then they did the same thing in the 10th. And then because baseball is a screwed-up game, two straight two-out base hits plated the winning run in the 11th.
Having run out of pitchers who can get hitters out, and having forgotten how to field fly balls, Duke fell apart in the third game and UVA won by 14. I can't decide which pop-up I enjoyed more: the one that landed about five yards behind second base because three Duke fielders collided on their way to it, or the one that landed about five feet in front of home plate because the Duke pitcher lost it in the wind. In the nine-run third, two of the three outs Duke recorded were sacrifice bunts. After that inning UVA had just as many hits as Duke and nine more runs.
If you paid attention to the starting rotation, you noticed Will Roberts got his ACC shot on Sunday, and you probably also noticed it didn't go too great. Roberts settled down some, but all in all gave up eight hits in five innings. But he walked nobody, which is the kind of thing that makes pitching coaches happy. For the same reason Cody Winiarski didn't get yanked after a couple tough outings here and there (that being: Brian O'Connor doesn't have a knee-jerk reaction to things) Roberts will almost certainly start next Sunday as well, and Cody will be the weekday guy for now. Both will be absolutely critical come the postseason.
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Newsy bits:
- Ausar Walcott is back on the football team, about a week after his charges were dropped. Because I trust London on matters of discipline, it seems to be a good indication that Walcott in fact was less involved than his teammates in the Great Harrisonburg Party Invasion. But he's now buried at defensive end. I don't even want to guess at why, but playing time there is in far shorter supply than it is at linebacker. The defense is still very much a work in progress and keeping track of the shuffles is sufficient to drive a man crazy, so I'm not going to read much past that into the move for now.
- Speaking of legal matters, the George Huguely murder trial will begin next February. Surprised at the length of time? Don't be. It is the way of the court system.
- When Mike Tobey committed to UVA in January, I thought he looked like a player who'd start attracting a lot more attention as time went on. Remember, he was supposed to reclassify to 2013 and then changed his mind, and I really think Tony Bennett is a big part of the reason why he changed his mind. Bennett didn't want another two years to go by for people to get a look at what Tobey could do. This is why. Besides Tobey, the other interesting name on that list is 2013 recruit Anthony Barber, who UVA is recruiting pretty hard. Remember that name because he's a possible answer to the point guard question. I want him at UVA just because his nickname is Big Cat, which is the kind of old-old-school Harlem Globetrotter nickname they don't even make any more.
- Speaking of bright futures in basketball, Joe Lunardi's way too early bracketology for 2012 has UVA sliding into the ill-conceived at-large play-in round. (Look, I don't care what the NCAA calls those Dayton games: UAB and USC didn't actually make the tourney this year.) Lunardi's probably about right in what our expectations should be for the season. The ACC will be much better, especially if Jordan Williams and Reggie Jackson and Harrison Barnes and whoever else stay in college, and our highly-improved team might not beat it's 7-9 mark from this season but 7-9 will look a hell of a lot better. Especially if having Mike Scott back with all these freshmen turned sophomores and a functional Assane Sene and a redshirted James Johnson and everything else means we don't screw the pooch against the Seattles and Iowa States of the world.
- Lastly, you remember how there used to be highlight videos around these parts? There haven't been this year because of a change in my living, and therefore TV, status. But I think I've got that covered now. The solution to AT&T's fascist unwillingness to let you download your recordings from DVR to computer arrived on a big brown truck today. It's hopefully only a matter of time before videos are firing again.
Flaw #1: the obvious inability to win a faceoff. This frustrates me to no end, not least because I'm about to harp on the problems at the faceoff X after a game in which UVA's faceoff men won 15 of 26 for 57%. That's not half bad. It's pretty good. But you know what makes my head explode? I've been thinking for a while that Ryan Benincasa should take the majority of the faceoffs, Garrett Ince and Brian McDermott should come in only rarely, if ever, and Chris LaPierre should be the second guy for a change of pace every so often And then Benincasa wins zero of five against Duke and Ince and McDermott combine for 71%. I've mentioned before that I think the faceoff problems are basically coaching problems because of the inordinate amount of faceoff violations called on our team, and I think the total lack of consistency also points to coaching.
Flaw #2 is that there is but one player on the offensive side of the field - Steele Stanwick - who can make his teammates better. And he sat out to rest his foot on Saturday. For my own sanity I'll just assume that Coach Starsia did that because this game didn't matter half of what the next one did and he wanted that ace in the hole he could throw in next week to change the game around....and not because Stanwick's injury got worse somehow. I hope to hell not.
This is partly why I have that nagging feeling that the end-of-career fade is beginning for Starsia. For the last decade UVA has had a star attackman that gathers assists nearly as fast as he gathers goals. Right now that's Stanwick. In the past it's been Danny Glading, or Ben Rubeor, or Matt Ward, or whatever. They score and they help their teammates score. When Stanwick leaves after next season, who'll that be? Stanwick's talent was immediately evident as a freshman. You can always tell who the heir apparent is. Not this time. It's not Matt White or Rob Emery; the former has disappointed this year and the latter looks like a nice complementary player along the lines of Colin Briggs. I dunno, maybe I'm overreacting and the reason nobody's really emerged is because of so many upperclassmen in the lineup, but I doubt it; Stanwick and even Chris Bocklet, not to mention the players of the past, played their way in and made themselves indispensible.
But I digress. Two major flaws in this team and we still only lose to Duke and Syracuse by two goals. The talent is there to blow the competition out of the water. But there are some missing elements. It's like a Corvette with four-cylinder engine.
It doesn't help that we drive it with the parking brake on and the gas cap hanging off. The silly mistakes are still there. They weren't as obvious as against UNC, but there they were. Example: Shamel Bratton jogging down the field after receiving a nice outlet pass following a turnover and setting up the offense. Fine, except....you're Shamel Bratton and nobody's covering you! Jog? Shamel should've been sprinting downfield and ripping a shot at a corner of the net. If it misses, fine....then go set up the offense. Instead, Shamel jogged across midfield and the team proceeded to huck the ball around the box for thirty seconds before lobbing a beach ball at Duke's net, which of course was saved. I'm not questioning Shamel's effort here, I'm questioning the recognition. The Brattons are the kings of "argh don't do th.....YES!" Would've been the time for it.
So as a punishment for losing to Duke like we always do, we get to play Duke again on Friday. Let's hope Steele Stanwick is the difference. I'm not brimming with optimism here.
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Fortunately, there's a cure for that: the baseball team. As punishment for beating our lacrosse team on Saturday, the baseball team beat Duke twice on Sunday - first by ripping their hearts out when they thought they had a real chance to steal a win, and then by stomping on it to the tune of 18-4 in the second game.
Friday was easy, of course, at least after the first three innings. Danny Hultzen served up seven innings of Danny freakin' Hultzen, although the early going was a little rocky while the UVA hitters tried to figure out how to get to Duke's soft-tossing lefty Dillon Haviland. Eventually they figured that out and before you knew it, it was 10-0, which is how the game ended. Shutout woo.
Sunday's game 1 was quite the pitchers' duel. UVA scratched out two runs against Dennis O'Grady and Duke did the same on a two-run double off of closer Kline, in relief of Tyler Wilson and his disgustingly efficient outing. Wilson took the blame for the runs but it wasn't fair the way he was pitching. Duke then brought scheduled third game starter Marcus Stroman in to finish it up.
Not a bad move, by the way. A few observers criticized the move but I liked it. For Duke, I mean. With Duke's miserable pitching staff you don't look for two of three against UVA. You look to steal one where you can get it, and so they went all-in and brought Stroman in, figuring that because he's a starter and the best pitcher they have, he could work some long innings in what you had to assumed would be an extra-inning game, and outlast UVA's bullpen while Duke worked on manufacturing a run. Stroman throws 95 and has the control of a kamikaze pilot. He plunked the first two batters he faced, which appeared to draw a warning from the home-plate ump - "one more of those and you're gone" is my bet, because UVA's third batter walked on four straight pitches that were so far outside they'd have been behind a hitter in the other batter's box. Bases loaded, none out, and UVA managed to score not even once. Then they did the same thing in the 10th. And then because baseball is a screwed-up game, two straight two-out base hits plated the winning run in the 11th.
Having run out of pitchers who can get hitters out, and having forgotten how to field fly balls, Duke fell apart in the third game and UVA won by 14. I can't decide which pop-up I enjoyed more: the one that landed about five yards behind second base because three Duke fielders collided on their way to it, or the one that landed about five feet in front of home plate because the Duke pitcher lost it in the wind. In the nine-run third, two of the three outs Duke recorded were sacrifice bunts. After that inning UVA had just as many hits as Duke and nine more runs.
If you paid attention to the starting rotation, you noticed Will Roberts got his ACC shot on Sunday, and you probably also noticed it didn't go too great. Roberts settled down some, but all in all gave up eight hits in five innings. But he walked nobody, which is the kind of thing that makes pitching coaches happy. For the same reason Cody Winiarski didn't get yanked after a couple tough outings here and there (that being: Brian O'Connor doesn't have a knee-jerk reaction to things) Roberts will almost certainly start next Sunday as well, and Cody will be the weekday guy for now. Both will be absolutely critical come the postseason.
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Newsy bits:
- Ausar Walcott is back on the football team, about a week after his charges were dropped. Because I trust London on matters of discipline, it seems to be a good indication that Walcott in fact was less involved than his teammates in the Great Harrisonburg Party Invasion. But he's now buried at defensive end. I don't even want to guess at why, but playing time there is in far shorter supply than it is at linebacker. The defense is still very much a work in progress and keeping track of the shuffles is sufficient to drive a man crazy, so I'm not going to read much past that into the move for now.
- Speaking of legal matters, the George Huguely murder trial will begin next February. Surprised at the length of time? Don't be. It is the way of the court system.
- When Mike Tobey committed to UVA in January, I thought he looked like a player who'd start attracting a lot more attention as time went on. Remember, he was supposed to reclassify to 2013 and then changed his mind, and I really think Tony Bennett is a big part of the reason why he changed his mind. Bennett didn't want another two years to go by for people to get a look at what Tobey could do. This is why. Besides Tobey, the other interesting name on that list is 2013 recruit Anthony Barber, who UVA is recruiting pretty hard. Remember that name because he's a possible answer to the point guard question. I want him at UVA just because his nickname is Big Cat, which is the kind of old-old-school Harlem Globetrotter nickname they don't even make any more.
- Speaking of bright futures in basketball, Joe Lunardi's way too early bracketology for 2012 has UVA sliding into the ill-conceived at-large play-in round. (Look, I don't care what the NCAA calls those Dayton games: UAB and USC didn't actually make the tourney this year.) Lunardi's probably about right in what our expectations should be for the season. The ACC will be much better, especially if Jordan Williams and Reggie Jackson and Harrison Barnes and whoever else stay in college, and our highly-improved team might not beat it's 7-9 mark from this season but 7-9 will look a hell of a lot better. Especially if having Mike Scott back with all these freshmen turned sophomores and a functional Assane Sene and a redshirted James Johnson and everything else means we don't screw the pooch against the Seattles and Iowa States of the world.
- Lastly, you remember how there used to be highlight videos around these parts? There haven't been this year because of a change in my living, and therefore TV, status. But I think I've got that covered now. The solution to AT&T's fascist unwillingness to let you download your recordings from DVR to computer arrived on a big brown truck today. It's hopefully only a matter of time before videos are firing again.
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