30 minutes of poor defense let Hokies off the hook

By Jerry Ratcliffe

Mike Young was as giddy as a fat man left behind to guard the pie after watching his Virginia Tech team end a five-year nightmare at John Paul Jones Arena on Saturday night.

Young knew his Hokies had stolen one, the first time Tech had beaten Virginia in Charlottesville since Young came on board. He also knew that this UVA defense was by far the worst the Cavaliers have offered up since 2010-11. Every season since then, Virginia was ranked anywhere from the nation’s best scoring defense to no worse than No. 6 in the country.

This year, the Wahoos are No. 27 and it showed big-time, as Ron Sanchez’ squad had no answer to Virginia Tech’s blazing 3-point shooting. The Hokies shot a sizzling 52 percent from Bonusphere, most of them wide-open looks, as Cavalier defenders couldn’t fight through screens and arrived too late.

For a complete nuts-and-bolts look at the game, full box score and team/player notebooks, updated schedule, ACC standings and more, check out our game recap here.

Not only did Tech break a string of five consecutive losses at JPJ, it scored 75 points, just enough to win by its chinny-chin-chin in a 75-74 slugout.

When Young was reminded that 75 points would have been considered a lot against Virginia in the past, he couldn’t contain his glee.

“You telling me, pal,” Young laughed.

The Hokies pretty much had it their way the majority of the game, building a 38-31 halftime bulge before expanding the lead to 13 with 6½ minutes to go (69-56). Credit the Cavaliers for not quitting at that point.

Andrew Rohde, who missed the win over Miami earlier in the week, wearing a protective boot, managed to fight through the pain and with limited practice time, made a difference down the stretch Saturday. Those final six minutes belonged to Rohde, as he scored 9 of UVA’s 18 points in rallying the team back to within a point at the buzzer.

It was only fitting that Rohde would get the last shot. After the Hokies’ Mylyjael Poteat missed a pair of free throws (the third front end Tech players missed in the final minute) with 5.9 seconds to play, UVA’s Blake Buchanan rebounded the second, passed to Rohde on the wing, and with no timeouts remaining, Rohde headed directly down the floor toward the basket, left it on the rim as the buzzer sounded.

“It felt good, felt like it was going in,” Rohde said. “I was just trying to get to the basket. I saw Taine (Murray) in the corner, but I didn’t know how much time was left, so I went to the basket.”

It was a heartbreaking moment for a guy who was playing through pain in an attempt to help his teammates (Rohde finished with 12 points on 4-of-11 shooting, 2 for 5 from beyond the arc, 7 assists, no turnovers in 32 minutes). After the miss, his teammates showed their appreciation for his effort with an embrace.

“Meant a lot,” Rohde said. “They all just came rushing toward me and told me to keep my head up. Just kind of goes to show what type of team we are.”

Leading scorer Isaac McKneely, who again led the way with 19 points and 7 assists, was one of those teammates.

“I thought it was going in, but you live with that shot,” McKneely said. “Coach Sanchez told us if [Poteat] misses, we’re only down one, so just try to get down the floor, get to the rim. Rohde did that. I’m living with that shot from Rohde all the time.”

For Virginia, now 10-12, 3-8 ACC, it was another gut-wrenching loss (54-52 to SMU, 70-67 to NC State, 64-62 to Memphis) and temporarily dropped the Cavaliers to the cutline for making the ACC Tournament field. Meanwhile, the Hokies (10-12, 5-6) continued to build their resume with a second ACC road win this week, good enough for ninth place with nine games to go.

Sanchez was hoping to defend home court and was proud of his team for getting major stops down the homestretch to make a game of it. The shame of it was that Virginia waited until it was desperately down by 13 to start playing defense.

Communication on that end of the floor seems to have been the problem yet again, a haunting reminder of the unfamiliarity with the complicated ‘Pack Line’ defense Virginia plays. These young players, transfers and freshmen, are running out of time to play catch up on the intricacies of the scheme.

It didn’t help that Sanchez was missing perhaps his most consistent player — forward Elijah Saunders — for the second straight game. Saunders, the team’s second-leading scorer, leading rebounder and perhaps the most physical of the Wahoos, was nursing a lower leg injury, putting a huge amount of pressure on UVA’s remaining bigs against a bigger group of Hokies.

It also didn’t help when Buchanan was whistled for a personal foul a minute and a half into the game, then quickly picked up a second at 16:24 and a paralyzing third at 9:33. That left 6-foot-10 redshirt freshman Anthony Robinson and 6-10 true freshman Jacob Cofie to handle Tech’s bigs.

Certainly, that posed a major problem that impacted Virginia’s entire defensive strategy and fueled Sanchez to draw his first technical foul of the season after Buchanan’s second whistle.

“I have a hard time with refs calling fouls within the first minute of the game … they impact the rotations of your team, especially when it’s not a play that impacts a score or a possession,” Sanchez said. “But to have calls made at the 19-minute mark in the game, when there’s no impact on the play, I have a hard time with that one.”

Buchanan, who had been a major contributor in recent games, sat most of the game, clocking only 5 minutes in the first half and 10 in the second.

Still, even if Virginia gets healthy and finds a way to avoid foul trouble, Sanchez has to come up with a way to improve the defensive communication or this team could sink to the depths of the league.