Lights off for Virginia at home

Standing outside the locker room at Georgia Tech last Sunday evening, Virginia coach Dave Leitao was happy with his team’s road upset over the Yellow Jackets. Happy, but not giddy.
He knew rougher days lied ahead. Saturday was one of those days.
Leitao thought that while perhaps a light had clicked on for a few of his guys in Atlanta, he couldn’t predict if it would disappear just as quickly. In yesterday’s 84-70 home loss to No. 22 Xavier, we all saw what Leitao was talking about.
While the crawl at the bottom of your TV screen will point out it was a 14-point loss, it was actually much worse. The Cavaliers trailed by 28 at one point and it may have remained that way had the visiting Musketeers kept their foot on the pedal.
The 10,174 fans who showed up expected a little more from their team. So did Leitao, who warned the Cavs all week about what would happen if they didn’t bring the same intensity to the table as they did against Georgia Tech.
Virginia’s hopes of pulling off a second straight upset sailed off the tracks at about 2:15 p.m. when the Cavs couldn’t stand their own prosperity. They led 8-4 when Xavier would have had a hard time tossing a beach ball into the ocean.
Noticing the holes
Leitao could see it coming even if his players couldn’t. Coaches spot things, little leaks in the wall that explode into a flood of problems.
This one was a 23-2 run by the Musketeers. When they were done, Virginia trailed 23-8 and things were never the same.
Game, set, match.
“After we got up 6-0, the margin was large enough that any one specific thing, negatively, would hurt us,” Leitao said. “I didn’t like how we came out of the gate defensively, things that we specifically worked on weren’t there. The naked eye couldn’t really see it, some specific things. We weren’t playing the game the way we planned to play it.”
While the coach probably meant the untrained eye couldn’t see Virginia’s misgivings, fans did see the results.
A repeat performance
Leitao remembered how Xavier took the Cavaliers apart last year in Cincinnati. That was an Elite Eight group of Musketeers that finished 30-7. He warned his team that no matter what happened this time around, Xavier wouldn’t reach for the panic button and he was correct.
However, after breaking down film all week on Xavier’s offense, about the cuts and screens the Musketeers used, it was as if all that intelligence had simply bounced over the Cavaliers’ skulls.
“We did it the first part of the game, but after that, [Xavier] made their run and took control,” said UVa forward Mike Scott who had 16 points on a 7 of 10 shooting performance. “Sometimes we fall asleep on ‘D’ ... I know I do.”
The lulls come on the offensive side of things as well, even though Leitao always insists that offensive shortcomings are derived from defensive issues.
“We go for too long and get into a funk offensively where we can’t get anything going,” said Cavaliers guard Sam Zeglinski (eight points, six assists, five rebounds). “That leads to bad shots, which leads to transition for them. They go on a run. The prime example was today when [Xavier] went on that run and we weren’t able to stop it soon enough before it got out of hand.”
Sensational rookie Sylven Landesberg, whom Xavier coach Sean Miller described as one of the best players his team has faced during an impressive 11-2 start against a challenging schedule, admitted the Cavs didn’t bring the same intensity to their home court as they did Georgia Tech’s a week ago.
“We’ve got to learn to keep that up the whole game against good teams,” said Landesberg, who led all scorers with 25 points, the seventh 20-point game of the season for the ACC’s early scoring leader. “It’s just execution, aggressiveness, keeping intensity the whole game.”
He believed his teammates had some of that at the beginning and at the end when the outcome was academic. But there was that glaring gap in between.
Leitao hinted after the Georgia Tech win that experience, or rather a lack of it, would play a role in every Virginia game this year, that his team would be a work in progress.
Landesberg stopped short of going there.
“I don’t want to blame it on that (inexperience),” the freshman said. “We backed down a little. Xavier did whatever it wanted.”
He was clearly bothered by getting hammered so decisively on his home court, a feeling we suspect Leitao would like to see spread throughout the ranks of his team.
“I’ve never been down by that much in my life, that kind of a deficit,” said Landesberg, a former McDonald’s All-American. “We’re a team with a lot of heart, but that heart disappeared for a little bit today.”
He wasn’t throwing his teammates under the bus because he accepted part of the blame as well.
“There were times we all weren’t playing hard,” Landesberg said. “We can’t have some people ready to play one day and some people not ready to play. We’ve got to all come together.”
Three Cavs that played major roles in the upset in Atlanta barely left a mark on the Musketeers. Guard Calvin Baker (13 points and the game-winner), guard Mustapha Farrakhan (12), and forward Jamil Tucker (15) were difference-makers against the Jackets.
On Saturday, they combined for five points (all by Farrakhan in the second half).
From this viewpoint it appears Virginia’s performance will be about as predictable as one of those cheap mood rings one finds in a gum machine.
Will the lights be on, off, flickering? Even Leitao doesn’t know and that’s why he’s selling defense so that he can at least have something to count on.
But are his players buying?