Will Cavs prove pundits wrong?

ATLANTA — Name just about any publication that puts out preseason basketball predictions and there’s a good chance Dave Leitao used to read it during his days as an assistant coach.
But not anymore.
“I pay zero attention to that,” said the Virginia coach recently, “and I can prove that I’m right.
“In the three years that whoever’s responsible for predicting — they’re 0 for 3. And so the likelihood of them being 0 for 4 is very strong.”
Leitao sure hopes so.
At ACC Media Day on Sunday, Virginia — to nobody’s surprise — was picked to finish dead last (12th) in the conference.
“We’ve always been picked to finish near the bottom ever since I’ve been here,” said Virginia senior Mamadi Diane, the team’s lone player representative at Media Day. “It acts as motivation, but it also tells us that we have no room for errors or slacking off, especially this year since we’re so young.”
UVa, which received just 79 points, finished well behind 11th-place Boston College (123), 10th-place Florida State (145) and ninth-place N.C. State (179).
North Carolina, as expected, was the unanimous choice to finish first. The Tar Heels (480) were followed by Duke (436), Wake Forest (354), Miami (344), Clemson (306), Virginia Tech (298), Maryland (192) and Georgia Tech (186).
Really, it’s pretty easy to understand Leitao’s lack of faith in the preseason prognosticators.
In his first year at the helm, Virginia was picked to finish last and wound up finishing seventh. In 2007, UVa was picked eighth and tied for first. Last season, the Cavs were picked fifth and took 10th.
“If somebody says that we’re going to be 10th place or fourth place or fifth place, it’s going to be wrong because the most important ingredient to the whole thing is something I don’t know yet,” Leitao said, “which is what’s in [the players’] mind and in their soul.
“The same goes for the other 11 teams. I don’t know what [Miami’s] Jack McClinton is thinking. I don’t know what [UNC’s] Ty Lawson’s thinking. I don’t know how ready [they] are or not.”
The predictions by the media are based largely on how many returning starters each team has. North Carolina (with three-time All-ACC Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough) has all five back, as do several other schools.
The Cavaliers, who lost Sean Singletary, their best player, to graduation, and Lars Mikalauskas, their best low-post player, to academic problems, have three starters returning — Diane, Jeff Jones and Mike Scott.
Making the situation challenging for Leitao is the fact that junior Calvin Baker, who was the favorite to be the opening-day starter at point guard, appears to be out of action for the foreseeable future with a stress fracture in his foot.
On Sunday, Leitao said Baker’s status is still uncertain, although he conceded Baker could miss the entire season, adding that surgery is one of many options being discussed.
“Unfortunately, the hot spot [of the fracture] is at a place where you don’t get much blood supply and that makes the healing process very slow,” Leitao said. “I don’t think anybody is that optimistic because of the area where he’s had the stress fracture.”
The status of Virginia junior Jamil Tucker isn’t any more lucid. Leitao said Tucker is attempting to strengthen the muscles in his injured shoulder. He
didn’t give any timetable for the forward’s return.
The best news to come out of Media Day was that Diane looks to be fully recovered from offseason foot surgery.
“It’s good to have gotten past that stretch where I’m not even thinking about my foot anymore,” Diane said.
Injuries have plagued Leitao’s teams in his three years, but he made sure to tell everyone on hand that he didn’t want to use them as an excuse.
Repeatedly, Leitao —when he wasn’t trying to get NFL scoring updates on his cellphone — gave the sportswriters in charge of the preseason predictions some good-natured ribbing about their lack of success.
He also made a few predictions of his own. Just like the media, he went with North Carolina at the top.
“You return your whole team and you went to the Final Four…somebody’s got to smack me and tell me I’m wrong if [North Carolina] isn’t picked to be the No. 1 team in the country,” Leitao said. “That doesn’t mean they’ll be undefeated or go back to the Final Four, but right now, today, that’s what you’ve got to say.”
Leitao picked Duke second. Interestingly, he ranked Miami and Georgia Tech fairly high.
Leitao said when he first took over at Virginia, Athletic Director Craig Littlepage gave him some words of wisdom.
“He told me there’s always a team or couple of teams that from today until the rest of the year will completely surprise the rest of the league.”
This year, Leitao will be hoping that Virginia is one of those teams.
Dunks
Tyler Hansbrough was named the conference’s preseason player of the year. …Virginia freshman Sylven Landesberg finished second in rookie of the year voting to Wake Forest’s Al-Farouq Aminu…There were two major rule changes that were announced at Media Day. The first pertains to the goaltending rule. Previously, a player could block a shot after it hit the backboard, so long as it was on its way up and clearly above the cylinder. That is no longer the case. Now, once the ball is released, touches the backboard and is above the cylinder, nobody is allowed to touch it. The other change was the distance of the 3-point line, which was moved back a foot to 20 feet, 9 inches.