Wake’s trip to Virginia was as painful as a trip to the dentist

By Jerry Ratcliffe

Maybe it was a sign of things to come. Andy and Barney of Mayberry would have called it such, that when Wake Forest’s bus pulled out of Winston-Salem on Friday, Coach Steve Forbes felt something strange.

The bridge on the entire left side of his mouth fell out and he thought to himself, how appropriate.

“I’ve always said playing Tony [Bennett] is like going to the dentist and having a root canal, getting your teeth pulled out,” Forbes chuckled Saturday afternoon after his high-scoring Demon Deacons dropped a painfully, slow-paced, low-scoring decision at Virginia, 49-47. “I lost three teeth right there, so I think it was apropos for what I was about to face today.”

Virginia did an about face on defense from its previous two games coming in, when the Cavaliers had given up back-to-back, 70-point games to Florida State and Pitt, the first time that had happened since 2017.

This time, UVA’s defense stuck like glue and threw a suffocating blanket over Wake’s shooters, who entered the game as one of the ACC’s most potent offenses, averaging 80 points per game.

It was a high-stakes battle, one for Quad 1 chips at the NCAA table, one that would go a long way toward a seeding in the 68-team field come Selection Sunday. It was also a home game for Virginia, which rarely loses within the friendly confines of JPJ.

For a complete game story, notebook, box score, sidebar on Tony Bennett’s first technical foul in 14 years, and a sidebar on Bennett’s ACC milestone, check out further coverage on this site.

Unlike a few weeks ago in Winston, where Virginia couldn’t seemingly get anything right and the Deacs were untouchable in a blowout win over the Cavaliers, it was Bennett’s team that appeared in control, leading for 28 minutes.

This time, Reece Beekman did what team captains do, put the team on his back and carried them to their 20th win with five games left to play in the regular season. Beekman was fabulous with a game-high 20 points (9 of 16 from the field, including 2 of 3 from Bonusphere), 4 assists, 2 turnovers in 33 minutes, plus played nasty defense.

Sharpshooter Isaac McKneely, who struggled from the arc in both games against the Deacs, discovered other ways to score and finished with 12 points, including the two death blows down the homestretch.

Coming out of the last media timeout, Bennett drew up a play especially for his sniper, with Beekman lasering a pass to McKneely wide open in the right corner. The 3-pointer was a dagger, a 46-42 lead with 3:40 to go.

Two minutes later, freshman center Blake Buchanan scored on a stickback of a Beekman-to-Ryan Dunn miss inside, putting the Cavaliers up 48-44.

Wake kept sending UVA shooters to the free-throw line and they kept missing, as the Cavaliers went Oh-for-10 until the Deacs made the mistake of fouling McKneely, the best foul shooter on the team, with 6.7 seconds to go.

A second earlier, Wake’s Hunter Sallis, who had torched Virginia in the first meeting with 21 points and who had personally hounded McKneely, had kept the Deacs alive in the rematch with a 3-pointer, putting his team within a mere point at 48-47.

McKneely caused some anxious moments for the sellout crowd as he missed the first free throw, then caused a collective sigh of relief through the arena when he finally converted the second for a 49-47 lead with less than seven seconds on the ticker.

Wake had burned all its timeouts, so Forbes had to rely on an old standby, but the execution was off and Cameron Hildreth missed a two-point attempt at the buzzer from just outside the paint.

“Cameron had no business bringing that ball up the floor,” Forbes said afterward about the final play. “It was Hunter’s [Sallis] ball to bring. I don’t know what happened there. This is where you need a timeout and we didn’t have one, so you’ve got to run it. It was poorly executed, which ultimately comes on my shoulder.”

Beekman, who praised Dunn for having “a crazy defensive game,” said that Virginia’s ball-screen defense was much better, which helped contain Wake’s explosive offense. The Deacs shot only 34.5 percent for the game and made only 5 of 21 from the arc after torpedoing the ‘Pack-Line’ with 3’s in the first meeting.

Dunn, who scored 6 points and added 9 rebounds, blocked 7 Wake shots, harassing Deac shooters all day long.

The big triple by McKneely coming out of that last TV timeout, which everyone agreed was the separation Virginia needed at that moment, was something called in the Cavaliers’ huddle.

“We set a lot of off-ball screens and it’s one of those actions that you try to get a clean look,” Bennett said of the call. “We hadn’t used it, and I thought there might be an opportunity. That was a bigtime pass by Reece and a bigtime shot by Isaac that we obviously needed.”

Virginia now has a short turnaround with a trip to Virginia Tech on Monday night.