Congratulations, Tony Bennett

After watching Virginia hang tough with North Carolina today, I think enough evidence has accumulated to prove there has been a seismic shift in Virginia basketball.  Virginia is now a legitimate team, and not just a legitimate team by virtue of a good year or two from a lucky recruiting class, but a legitimate program.  Any team might get lucky and have a chance to pull off a big upset, but how UVA did it shows they will be a team to watch out for in years to come.  How they hung with UNC was not a fluke, but a continuation of how they’ve been playing all year, and all the credit has to start with Tony Bennett.

If you haven’t noticed yet, Virginia is a defensive powerhouse.  They held the number two scoring offense in the nation, an offense averaging 82.9 points per game, to 54 points, on 33.3% shooting.  That is in fact about two points above Virginia’s average, as they possess the number two scoring defense in the country, at 52.1 points per game. They have allowed over 60 points in only 4 out of 28 games, and over 70 in only 1.  The tape is no less impressive than the statistics; in fact, watching a game provides fairly obvious support for why the numbers are so low.

Virginia is playing so well, and allowing so few points, because Tony Bennett has done the two most important things a coach can do: he has created a workable system and gotten all of his players to buy into it.  Virginia employs the same system Bennett succeeded with at Washington State, a slow, methodical, smart offense backed up by a type of man-to-man defense known as the “packline,” invented by Bennett’s father Dick (a reasonable explanation of the system can be found here).  Any players who did not totally buy into the system are gone, and the results can be seen in consistent and fairly incredible defensive intensity.  Watching a Virginia game reverses the fan’s definition of a good play, as instead of great scoring and fancy dunks one has to appreciate that moment where the ballhandler comes around a screen obviously expecting a driving lane which is somehow simply not there, or the last few seconds of the shot clock, when the fan noise rises to a fever pitch and whichever frustrated player is left with a ball has to jack up a random contested attempt which just so obviously has no chance.

The effort is there on the offensive end of the floor too, though at the moment Virginia simply does not have the talent level to score consistently on a nightly basis no matter how hard they run their sets.  Nevertheless, the fact that Virginia can compete with UNC and Duke only a couple years after Bennett rescued the program from the rubble of the Dave Leitao era is fairly remarkable.  UVA has secured three 4-star recruits for the upcoming year, so the future looks bright.  If Virginia can continue recruit more talented and athletic players while retaining the same commitment to the system evident in this year’s scrappy bunch, they could be well placed for success in the ACC, and even nationally, for the foreseeable future.  For creating a program from practically nothing, congratulations, Tony Bennett.