After building some momentum recently in ACC play with three straight wins and four in the last five, the Virginia basketball team crashed back into a reality check on Monday night. The Hoos hung tough for the first five minutes at the John Paul Jones Arena before No. 3 Duke slowly and precisely picked them apart to roll to an 80-62 victory.
In some ways, that final score is a little bit deceptive too. The Blue Devils led by as many as 27 points and by more than 20 for most of the second half until UVA trimmed away some of the deficit in the final three minutes. That dropped the Cavaliers back to .500 at 13-13 this season with a 6-9 record in ACC play.
The Hoos said they'll try to regroup and focus on the games ahead rather than dwell on the lopsided loss Monday. UNC is up next as UVA travels to Chapel Hill on Saturday.
"Kind of like coach says after every game, leave this one here and we're going to go prepare for the next one the same way we prepare for all of our games," Virginia guard Andrew Rohde said. "Just keep that energy flowing about us. We can't hang our heads. We can't do anything about what happened tonight besides look back at the film and try to get better at certain aspects."
Multiple things will get a look after the 18-point loss, but one will be to try to get the offense back on track. Virginia had scored 70+ points in five straight games entering Monday night's matchup and that had helped get some of those recent wins on the board. UVA labored to even get to 60 against one of the nation's stingier defenses, though. Duke came into the game ranked No. 4 nationally in defensive efficiency and it was easy to see why as the Devils overwhelmed the Hoos at times.
The hosts had to really work to get any shots and had to work even harder to generate quality looks. Then even when they found a way to expose a seam in the defense or to attack the rim, they missed some of those typically high percentage chances. Duke's length and athleticism certainly contributed to those struggles. The visitors throw out 6'9" Cooper Flagg, 6'6" Isaiah Evans, 6'6" Tyrese Proctor, 6'6" Sion James, 6'7" Kon Knueppel, 6'11" Patrick Ngongba II, and 7'2" Khaman Maluach among others in their lineups.
Virginia produced some points outside the 3-point line on 8-22 shooting (36.4%) and at the free throw line on 14-17 shooting (82.4%), but shot only 38.5% overall (20-52). The Cavaliers had a lot of challenges in two-point territory and close to the rim as Duke presented challenges for any attempts to get going there. Ultimately, UVA shot 12-30 on shots inside the arc (40.0%) and made only 8-19 attempts on layups or dunks (42.1%). Duke logged 5 blocked shots.
"They're big, not only at the rim but they're long on the perimeter as well," Virginia interim coach Ron Sanchez said. "Flagg is not 6'5", Knueppel is 6'6", 6'7". They have length at a lot of positions and those guys also have a lot of skill at the rim. [Maluach's] just big, he's long, he tippy-toes and grabs the rim. We went in there and he challenged us, but we wanted to play off two feet and see if we could find some perimeter shooters off of our penetration and they kind of got some deflections there. They challenged us. This is probably the most length we've faced at the rim all season long."
Here are some more takeaways from the Virginia loss to Duke.
Rebounding Nightmare
Duke's size and athleticism showed up in another category in a big way too. The Blue Devils dominated the rebounding category 41-21. That included 10 offensive rebounds despite shooting 52.5% for the game (31-59), which limited how many total O-Boards were available.
Cooper Flagg caused plenty of those problems with 14 rebounds on the night. He finished with 17 points too to complete a double-double. Kon Knueppel added 7 boards to go with 17 points as well, while Isaiah Evans had 17 points and 3 rebounds. Khaman Maluach had 2 points and 4 rebounds.
The issues were particularly bad in the first half as Duke dominated the glass 24-8. The Devils grabbed 8 offensive rebounds in the opening half to help secure 14 second chance points. That means Duke won the rebounding 24-21 even if you don't count its second half rebounding. Yeah, it was that much of a problem.
"The first half, I mean, they really just made a statement on the glass," Sanchez said. "So many second chance points, that was the factor. I think it was 14 second chance points in the first half and I think the score was 29-43 so really that was the difference in the game. Give Duke a lot of credit. They played hard. They didn't take any possessions off. Their size, their athleticism ... we knew we had some disadvantages on the glass, but we thought we would do a much better job than we did. That was unacceptable. Our interior players have to do a much better job of rebounding the basketball."
Blake Buchanan had 2 points and 3 rebounds, Jacob Cofie had 0 points and 0 rebounds, Elijah Saunders had 7 points and 3 rebounds, and Anthony Robinson had 7 points and 3 rebounds.
Virginia Starting Guards Found A Way
One of the chief concerns entering the game may have been whether Virginia guards could score against the Duke defense consistently. The Blue Devils have size on the perimeter as noted above, but they also have the ability to switch defensively all over the floor if wanted and that's something that has caused problems for UVA's off-ball screening actions both in the past and this season. Duke did deploy that frequently again this time around.
UVA's starters found a way to be productive, though. Andrew Rohde scored 15 points on 5-10 shooting overall and 3-4 shooting at the free throw line. He made 2 of 4 3-pointers to help up his total. He added 5 rebounds and 5 assists with 2 turnovers. Multiple times, particularly in the first half, Rohde got an angle to the basket to either score or draw fouls. The analytics show that he drew 6 fouls.
Dai Dai Ames also had success off the dribble as he sliced to the rim and then hit some hanging shots or reverse layups to keep those shot blocking threats at bay. He ended up with 15 points and 3 assists with only 1 3-pointer in the mix. That's his fifth straight game with double digits in the scoring column.
Finally, Isaac McKneely overcame some heavy attention to tally 14 points, 3 rebounds, and 2 assists. The bulk of his scoring came on shots from the perimeter as he made 4-7 3's on the night (a 2-2 free throw trip gave him his other points). McKneely has multiple 3-pointers in 19 games, including the last 8 games.
"I could not have asked more from Andrew, from Dai Dai, or from I-Mac," Sanchez said. "I think those three guys showed up and they met the challenge. They played well. We just didn't get what we needed from other positions."
Not Many Answers
While those guards did get some scoring going, the Hoos really didn't have much luck defensively.
As noted above, three different players - Flagg, Knueppel, and Evans - registered 17 points. James came close with 9 points, while Ngongba added 8. Evans, James, and Ngongba missed a total of 2 shots between them with Evans going 6-7, Ngongba 4-5, and James 3-3. Overall, the Blue Devils shredded the defense for 52.5% shooting (31-59), 39.1% 3-point shooting (9-23), and 81.8% free throw shooting (9-11).
The advanced analytics really paint a picture of the struggles, though. Duke scored 1.404 points per possession and produced points on 61.4% of its total possessions in the game. The first half numbers are even more eye-popping. In the first 20 minutes, the visitors scored 1.593 points per possession and posted points on an astonishing 70.4% of the possessions. A lot of that came from the offensive rebounding problems discussed above with 14 second chance points erasing any initial stops. That's really low resistance regardless of opponent, but obviously problematic against a team with Duke's skills.
The Devils made 16 combined layups and dunks in the game too as they regularly got high percentage chances. They made 64.0% of those shots at the rim.
Simply put, that's way too much to overcome.
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