EASY DOES IT

Virginia’s slow pace a rarity for teams in Final Four

Tony Bennett has been Virginia’s head coach since the 2009-10 season. Through the decade, the team has been known for its slower style of play. But the Cavaliers’ 2019 season was saved when a freshman decided to buck tradition and play fast.

Down two points to Purdue with just 5.9 seconds remaining in last week’s Elite Eight, Mamadi Diakite back-tapped a Ty Jerome missed free throw. Kihei Clark raced down the court and, after corralling the loose ball, took two dribbles before quickly unleashing a one-handed bullet pass to Diakite, who sank the game-tying jump shot as time expired.

“We didn’t have a lot of time left,” Clark said after the game. “Just tried to advance the ball as quickly as I could…I knew we didn’t have a lot of time, so I just tried to make a play.”

Though Clark’s 20-foot assist was Virginia’s “play of the season,” as NCAA reporter Andy Katz described it, don’t expect the Cavaliers to suddenly embrace an up-tempo pace, much like Auburn, its Final Four opponent on Saturday night.

It has been 35 years since the UVA program danced until the final weekend, a drought that included Virginia falling victim to the first-ever 16-1 upset in NCAA tournament history, and Bennett and his staff will remain steadfast to its pace principles, which, if the Cavaliers are successful, will finally answer the question: can a team that plays as slow as Virginia win an NCAA title?

It is a proposition that, on paper, is highly unlikely. According to Ken Pomeroy, the average Division I team in 2019 used 67 possessions per game — Virginia used 59. During the course of a season, if UVA uses eight fewer possessions it isn’t overly concerning; after all, Bennett’s offensive and defensive strategies — blocker-mover and the pack-line, respectively — are both based on working an opponent to the point of mental and physical exhaustion. It’s just as draining to chase shooters off of screens for 25 seconds as it is to continually drive into a defense that doesn’t allow opponents to attempt anything but a perimeter jumper.

In a one-game setting like the NCAA tournament, though, a team can’t be static, and needs variance to account for unexpected circumstances. As Virginia learned in the first-round last year versus UMBC, missing a handful of shots that you normally make in a low possession game, can turn a sure-fire win into a historic upset.

Since Pomeroy launched his statistical database in 2002, there has never been an NCAA champion who used as few possessions as UVA has used in 2019. More than half of those seventeen squads stuck closely to their respective season’s DI average, and the fast-paced playing others — like Maryland in 2002 and North Carolina in 2009 — transformed those additional possessions into extra buckets. UVA does have one historical comparison in the modern era: 2015 Wisconsin. The Badgers entered that March Madness using just 58 possessions, the slowest in the field, and advanced to the title game, losing to a oneand-done laden Duke. What made that squad unique, though, was how it combined efficiency with shot volume: through the Elite Eight, Wisconsin took 104 shots per 100 possessions, scoring 1.29 points per possession. The team’s variance was its efficiency (up from 1.26 in the regular season), and at that point, the number of possessions didn’t matter.

Virginia is currently operating like a mini-Wisconsin. UVA has attempted 102 shots per 100 possessions, an increase of four shots since the regular season ended. When coupled with the team’s already efficient scoring — only Auburn has a higher points per possession rate (1.18 PPP) than UVA’s (1.12) — the Cavaliers could be on the verge of yet another historic NCAA tournament moment.

This isn’t a typical Bennett-coached UVA squad. The Cavaliers may play slowly, but the team’s offense is nearly automatic in the halfcourt — its points per play rank in the 98th percentile. But just as Clark added variance to the Elite Eight, speeding up the pace to find Diakite waiting near the basket, Virginia has so far managed to counter its watching-the-grass-grow style of play by boosting its attempts to take full advantage of its efficient scoring.

So don’t expect another collapse this weekend: the Cavaliers are an analytics juggernaut who’ll steadily score in bunches.