A toxic combination

You don’t need to be John Wooden or even Isiah Thomas to figure out where things went wrong for the Virginia men’s basketball team in 2007-08.
On offense, UVa was too one-dimensional. On defense, well, the Cavaliers had dementia.
Throw in a couple of injuries, inexperience at a couple key positions and the loss of J.R. Reynolds to graduation and you have a big mess.
The toxic elements added up to a 17-16 record and 10th-place finish in the ACC.
It was hard to see it all coming. A year before, Virginia had won a share of the regular-
season league title and made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
The upward trend seemed to be continuing. In the first week of the season, Virginia flew to Tucson and knocked off then-No. 17 Arizona.
In that game, UVa star Sean Singletary had help from his friends. Freshman Jeff Jones looked like the second coming of Reynolds in nailing 5 of 7 from
3-point range. Mamadi Diane and Jamil Tucker were a combined 5 of 6 from downtown. Lars Mikalauskas and Ryan Pettinella hauled in 10 rebounds.
Defensively, Virginia held a potent Arizona team — which featured two likely NBA lottery picks (Jerryd Bayless and Chase Budinger) — to 48 percent, while shooting 51 percent themselves.
“It goes [down] as a statement,” Virginia coach Dave Leitao told The Daily Progress back on Nov. 17. “You’re playing a ranked team that doesn’t lose too much in this building, so [the win] has to be right near the top.”
Unfortunately for Leitao and Virginia fans, things quickly disintegrated from there.
UVa was wretched in the Philly Classic. The Cavs played uninspired in wins over Drexel and Penn before getting smacked around by Seton Hall in the championship game.
But the true sign that Virginia might be in serious trouble came against Xavier on Jan. 3 when the Cavs were embarrassed, 108-70.
That game set the tone for conference play where Virginia found a way to lose all the close games that it had managed to pull out the season before.
UVa had lost just once at John Paul Jones Arena in its inaugural season. By the end of January, the Cavs had lost three times at home.
Offensively, Virginia was hurt by the absence of Mikalauskas, who missed the entire month. The Lithuanian was the only true low-post option at Leitao’s disposal.
Without him in the lineup, the ball almost never went inside and Virginia became even more reliant on the 3-point shot than it already was.
That put pressure on Diane and senior Adrian Joseph to pick up more of the slack for Reynolds.
Joseph got off to a great start, but playing out of position at power
forward caught up to him by the time the non-cupcake portion of the schedule began.
Diane, as he did in his first two years, showed flashes of greatness, but couldn’t ever put together more than a couple good games in a row — until it was too late.
Meanwhile, Jones had already gone into the tank. After his impressive coming-out party in the desert, the first-year shooting guard didn’t make another 3-pointer for two months, a span of 19 games.
Leitao admitted that his team’s offensive woes stemmed this season, in part, from the lack of an inside game.
“You’ve got to be able to put the ball below the free-throw line and enter it around the basket in order to have some success,” he said. “We didn’t do that enough.
“Teams started to zone us at the end of the season, daring us to [go inside] because they left a lot of open pockets in the interior of their defense.”
On the defensive end, Virginia clearly missed senior Tunji Soroye. The 6-foot-11 Nigerian, who appeared in just two games all season, would have given the team, if
nothing else, a shot-blocking presence.
Virginia finished dead last in the ACC in swats.
“It’s not just having a shot blocker — it’s having [Soroye] in the lane,” Mamadi Diane said. “He changes a lot of shots and keeps guys from penetrating.”
But the deficiencies on defense were more mental than physical. How else to explain that 31-point home loss to Clemson on Feb. 7? Virginia allowed the Tigers to shoot 62 percent (16 of 26) from 3-point range.
“I look at it as a mindset,” said Leitao, when asked about his team’s season-long defensive malaise. “Some of that mindset you get to control, other times you have to be able to trust that they can take a certain amount of pride and understanding with it.
“Somewhere along the line, there was a disconnect with a lot of that.”
A mini turning point in the
season came on Feb. 12 when Mikalauskas returned to the lineup. The fiery big man gave Leitao’s lethargic squad a shot of badly needed adrenaline.
Virginia lost to North Carolina at home by a point, but the Cavaliers competed — something they hadn’t done in a while.
UVa finished the regular season by winning four of its last six. The Cavs, behind an unbelievable performance from Singletary on Senior Night, knocked off Maryland in a game that almost made Wahoo Nation forget about the misery it had endured until that point.
But the feel-good vibes quickly vanished after a weak effort against Georgia Tech in the ACC Tournament and uneven performances in the inaugural College Basketball Invitational.
“I told the team that the next year started when that final whistle blew,” said Leitao, who has been running his players into the ground with 6 a.m. workouts all week. “I know that I’m more determined than ever to make sure we do the proper things in the offseason to get us ready for the next year.”