Offensive struggles sink Leitao

One of the most obvious signs that the Virginia men’s basketball team might not have been in the right hands came just after the 2005-06 season when coach Dave Leitao felt the need to bring in an offensive consultant.
“I had been locked in for so many years into a structured offense,” Leitao told The Daily Progress before this season began. “We ran it [in 2005-06] and had a lot of problems because what I didn’t realize about the ACC is that everybody pressures the ball and denies the wings and forces you out of your offense.
“A good counter to that is motion because it’s unpredictable.”
To that end, Leitao solicited the advice of Dave Paulsen, who was the coach of Williams College at the time. Paulsen had created a “motion” system that incorporated principles from numerous styles of play.
Initially, the style was a good fit for Virginia’s personnel. But in the end, its free-flowing nature and over-dependence on guards and the 3-point shot made UVa too one-dimensional.
When you throw in the fact that Virginia was the worst defensive outfit in the ACC for two consecutive years, it’s easy to see why the school and Leitao parted ways on Monday.
This season, Virginia
finished last in the ACC in field-goal percentage (.417) and 3-point field-goal percentage (.316). UVa finished second-to-last in points per game (70.0) and assists (12.4), and had the third worst assist-to-turnover margin in the league.
On Jan. 24, the team’s offense hit rock bottom in an atrocious home loss to Florida State. 24. In that game, UVa went nearly the entire first half without a field goal before finishing with three.
Of course, the offensive system had nothing to do with Virginia’s frequent inability to pass the ball inbounds — something that drew the ire of fans more than just about anything.
In Leitao’s final game as coach last Thursday, Virginia committed 20 turnovers in the loss to BC in the first round of the ACC Tournament. Leitao promised that cutting down on the miscues would be an emphasis going into next season.
“It’s a number of reasons,” he said, when asked about the consistently high numbers. “It’s not just passing to a guy and it gets intercepted. It’s a travel. It’s a bobble. It’s a dropped ball, a strip — a lot of different things that we have to look at and attack.
“Some of it we’re pretty confident will be diminished, some of it we’ll have to work real hard to diminish.”
Leitao, obviously, will never get that chance — and you can bet whoever his replacement is will have his own offensive philosophies.
Paulsen’s system may have worked well for him, but for Leitao it often seemed as if he was trying to put square pegs into round holes.
The linchpin to Paulsen’s system was having good guards. The first year that Leitao used it, he had them in J.R. Reynolds and Sean Singletary.
But after Reynolds graduated in the 2007-08 season, teams were able to focus all of their attention on Singletary and the offense wasn’t nearly as fluid.
A major downside to the approach was its lack of involvement from post players. Leitao’s argument was that he never had any talented big men. That may have been true to a certain extent, at least initially, but that doesn’t explain why the ball rarely went inside. Doing so would have at least kept defenses honest — even if the end result was just a return pass to the perimeter.
The longstanding belief is that a successful offense should work from the inside-out. Virginia’s offense seemed to be the exact opposite.
Because of that, UVa became overly dependant on its perimeter players and the 3-point shot, which, one could argue, weren’t their strengths.
Skilled big man Mike Scott was a frequent bystander in the offense. Guard Calvin Baker was too often the featured attraction.
Before the season started, Leitao said many things had drawn him to Paulsen’s offense.
“What he has is a very simplistic way of playing that puts four guys on the perimeter and one guy on the interior and allows — with rules — players to make plays and make decisions that is contrary to what a scouting report can take away,” he said.
When executed well, Paulsen — who won the 2003 Division III national championship at Williams and is now the head coach at Bucknell — believes his offense is the best way to play. One of the keys to its success, Paulsen said back in November, is having players with high basketball IQ’s.
“If you don’t have that, then there are times when you run the motion offense and it looks like you’ve never practiced,” said Paulsen, who finished 7-23 in his first year at Bucknell. “There is some danger.”
The last two seasons of Virginia basketball have certainly been a testament to that.