Virginia might be tempted to turn up tempo against thin WVU

By Jerry Ratcliffe

While it goes against the grain of Tony Bennett’s philosophy, the Virginia coach might want to turn up the tempo just a bit when his Cavaliers meet West Virginia in Wednesday night’s consolation match of the Fort Myers Tip-Off (6 p.m., FS1 television).

The Mountaineers (2-2) are short-handed for a variety of reasons, which hasn’t helped their chances in their first year without longtime coach Bob Huggins. Instead, interim coach Josh Eilert has a thin roster that simply ran out of gas in the second half in a 70-58 loss to future ACC member SMU on Monday night.

The Mountaineers led the Mustangs, 36-25, at halftime, but were so exhausted, WVU managed to score a mere 22 points in the second half.

Knowing that Virginia plays a slow tempo, Eilert wasn’t complaining about the matchup.

“I don’t want to be quick to say that [a slower pace would help WVU], but yeah, I’d like to slow this thing down a little bit and be a little more deliberate ourselves,” Eilert said. “Certainly, I want to take advantage of the open floor if we can score early, and if not, score late.”

In West Virginia’s four games this season, it has had only nine players dressed (eight of them are scholarship players). Arizona transfer Kerr Kriisa, the team’s point guard, has five games to go on his nine-game suspension to start the season, and Akok Akok has not returned after collapsing on the court on Oct. 27 during an exhibition game against George Mason.

The Mountaineers got more bad news on Tuesday when the NCAA denied RaeQuan Battle’s appeal. The 6-foot-5 guard is a two-transfer player who played two seasons at Washington and two seasons at Montana State before transferring to West Virginia. He averaged 17.7 points per game in leading Montana State to the Big Sky championship last March, advancing to the NCAA Tournament.

SMU was keenly aware of WVU’s situation on Monday night and upped the tempo and pressed on defense to wear down the Mounties, who essentially played with a six-man rotation. West Virginia tried a slow grind on offense and continued to experiment with a 2-3 zone defensively in an attempt to lessen the pace, but it didn’t work.

The Mustangs also double- and triple-teamed WVU’s leading scorer, Jesse Edwards, who transferred from Syracuse. The Netherlands native finished with 18 points and 9 boards and blocked 3 shots. Quinn Slazinski, a 6-9 Iona transfer, had 13 points for the Mountaineers.

“I thought we had a pretty good first half, we were really rebounding it well,” Eilert said after the loss. “To be honest, a lot of those shots [SMU was] taking were uncontested, so they started falling in the second half. I tell you, we weren’t good enough there late in the game with a short bench to match their physicality, the way they run out and try to get easy points. I knew that’s what they were going to do and they wore us down.”

West Virginia was so worn down that Eilert used timeouts to allow his team to catch its wind.

“Yeah, that’s where we are at with timeouts it seems like,” the coach said. “I could read them in terms of their exhaustion levels and we’re really only playing six guys with our backup freshman point guard (Jeremiah Bembry) has been injured the last two days. Should’ve got Pat (Suemnick) in there a little bit more but didn’t get the opportunity to do so, but he gave us good minutes in the first half. More than anything, we couldn’t get that offensive cohesion and couldn’t get our defense set in the second half and it wore us down.”

Meanwhile, Bennett has his own problems to deal with after Virginia was outrebounded, 48-21, in a lopsided defeat by Wisconsin. Afterward, Bennett talked at length about how the Badgers physically manhandled the Cavaliers.

Basketball analytics from Bart Torvik, noted that Wisconsin rebounded more than 50 percent of its misses against UVA and allowed the Cavaliers to rebound less than 10 percent of their misses, only the 11th time since 2008 (when his data began) that a team has accomplished that against a high-major opponent. (See his numbers: @totally_t_bomb).

Remember though that Virginia rarely has good offensive rebound numbers because Bennett’s philosophy is to get back down the floor and set up the Pack-Line defense.

Virginia is a 9-point favorite over West Virginia.