UVa continues non-conference play against Auburn

Earlier this week, during a rant about his alma mater’s hiring of Gene Chizik as its new football coach, Charles Barkley managed to get in a poke at current Auburn basketball coach Jeff Lebo.

The former NBA All-Star revealed that he was against the hiring of Lebo back in 2004. In fact, Barkley said he served on a search committee and suggested, among others, UAB’s Mike Davis (formerly of Indiana) and Oklahoma’s Jeff Capel (formerly of Virginia Commonwealth).

“Out of all the basketball coaches they interviewed, they picked the only one who hadn’t been to the NCAA Tournament,” Barkley told ESPN.com.

This afternoon, Lebo — who probably won’t be sending Barkley a Christmas card — brings his 5-4 squad into John Paul Jones Arena for a game that tips off at 4 p.m.

Auburn is coming off laughers over Tuskegee and Louisiana-Monroe, while Virginia (4-3) is coming off an easy win of its own over Longwood that snapped a three-game losing streak.

“It’s going to be a big test for us since they’re a good ACC team and are a lot bigger than we are,” said Auburn senior Korvotney Barber, “so we have to use our quickness to our advantage.”

Lebo, who is 62-68 with just one winning season in his four-plus years at Auburn, said one of his team’s focuses will be putting the clamps on UVa freshman Sylven Landesberg, who is coming off a

20-point effort versus Longwood — the fourth time this season he has scored 20 or more.

“You’ve got to try and keep him out of [the lane] the best you can,” said Lebo, whose team finished sixth in the SEC West last season. “It’s easy to say, but hard to do. You have to be able to defend him in multiple ways. He’s very good at going off the bounce one way and then changing, making two or three multiple moves.

“You can’t rely on defending him with one guy. I think you’ve got to have a team defense to try and keep him out of the paint area.”

Lebo has been extremely impressed by Landesberg.

“I love his skill level,” said the North Carolina alum. “I love his ability to put the ball on the floor — he’s very smooth with it and excellent in the open court. He can get to the basket, gets to the foul line, is a good foul shooter…you can see why he was a McDonald’s All-American.

“He’s going to be a tremendous player at Virginia for the next three or four years or however long he decides to stay there.”

Virginia coach Dave Leitao certainly hopes it will be four years. It’s pretty hard to imagine where UVa would be right now had the New York native stayed home to play at St. John’s.

Landesberg, who is averaging 19.1 points and 6.1 rebounds per game, is looking forward to today’s matchup.

“They’re a pretty good team and have played some good competition,” said Landesberg, alluding to Auburn’s seven-point loss on the road to No. 7 Xavier. “They either won their games or lost close ones, so we’re in for a good one.”

Like Virginia, Auburn has also had a couple of head-scratching losses — to Northern Iowa and Mercer.

Leitao is hoping his team can build on the Longwood win, a much-improved performance in which the Wahoos dominated the glass.

“I hope everything works well for us — that we play well, our bench is excited, guys are excited, our crowd is [into it],” Leitao said. “It’s going to take that kind of effort from everybody to beat a good team like that.”

Added guard Sammy Zeglinski: “We just need to focus on what we need to do. We don’t want to beat ourselves. I think earlier in the season, especially against Liberty, we beat ourselves, and even against Syracuse we had the game won. We just made too many mistakes at the end.

“So we’re just going to concentrate on us and stick to our principles and fundamentals.”

Dunks

Virginia will complete the two-game series with Auburn when it travels there next season…UVa leads the all-time series, 3-2. The Cavs won the last meeting, 89-87, in a game played at the Siegel Center in Richmond. … The UVa coaching staff will see a familiar face in Auburn forward Johnnie Lett, who committed to UVa in 2006 before electing to attend junior college in Florida. Lett has started seven of the team’s nine games and is averaging 4.1 points and 3.2 rebounds. “He’s a pretty athletic big guy,” said Auburn coach Jeff Lebo. “He doesn’t score a lot for us. His role is just to defend. He can run pretty well and rebound the basketball.”