Bennett has UVA locked in for long run
CHARLOTTE – Tony Bennett is a man of deep religious faith, bedrock basketball principles for which he offers no apology and an inner peace so unshakable that it can seem almost eerie.
Year after year, those attributes have brought him back here with Virginia teams that play above their recruiting rankings and exhibit the sport’s most admirable qualities. Discipline. Unselfishness. Toughness.
But never before has this entire era of Bennett’s career hinged on one NCAA tournament in the way it does this year. If not now for the No. 1 Cavaliers, when will they shed their reputation as a March Madness sob story? If not this time with a 31-2 team that rolled to the Atlantic Coast Conference regular-season and tournament titles, why would anyone believe the future will be any different?
“Every program wants to win a national championship, get a Final Four berth, those kinds of things,” Bennett said. “But I know the way to do that is to lock in and say, all right, earn the right to get to the next game. There’s so many good things that have happened for us this year that won’t be taken away (if we don’t get there), but how you choose to judge your program, you look at our league with Duke and North Carolina and the national championships, they’ve done that and that’s why we’ll just continue to knock.”
Indeed, in Charlottesville, the Cavaliers have a door knocker mounted in their locker room, a metaphor for how Bennett has molded one of the nation’s most consistently great programs in arguably the toughest league.
But for all the regular-season spoils Virginia has earned, there has been a jarring lack of NCAA tournament success. And at some point, that hole on the résumé becomes a burden weighing on any program, no matter how unflappable its leader seems to be.
“My faith helps me in situations like that, to see a bigger picture and perspective,” Bennett said. “It doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting and you don’t want to be there, but that’s life. You’re not always going to get what you want.
“Every tough loss brings incredible wisdom, and that’s one of our pillars about thankfulness is will you be thankful for whatever adversity or losing teaches you? And if you’re able to look at it, as not enjoyable as it is, and really glean from it, I think you can grow in ways you probably wouldn’t grow in success.”
That isn’t just lip service from Bennett. Two years ago, Virginia was a No. 1 seed, totally in control of an Elite Eight game with eight minutes left and on the verge of silencing those critiques that the Cavaliers play too slow, that his system relies too much on defensive perfection, that they don’t have the kind of next-level athletes who you need to rise above the pressure when baskets get hard to come by late in a game.
But Virginia totally collapsed that day, squandering a 13-point lead against a Syracuse team it had handled earlier in the season, missing out on the chance to go to its first Final Four since 1984.
After the game, Bennett was beyond stoic. His composure hadn’t changed; his demeanor was barely any different than it had been two days earlier after beating Iowa State. At arguably the most painful moment of his career, he seemed so anchored to his lack of emotion that it seemed almost unnatural.
Bennett’s steadiness is useful in a sport, and in a tournament, where only one team walks away happy and the rest suffer some level of regret about what might have been. It explains how he lost nearly every key contributor from that run, reset the roster and came back this season with a team that started unranked but ripped through its schedule without a hint of adversity.
At least until now. Freshman wing De’Andre Hunter, who was named the ACC’s sixth man of the year, will miss the tournament after suffering a broken left wrist, even though he played with the injury in the ACC tournament. It’s potentially a crushing loss for the Cavaliers, robbing them of one of their most versatile and athletic players and raising the degree of difficulty on their quest to break through to the Final Four.
“He’s a great player, and he’s been great for us,” guard Ty Jerome said. “We’ll miss him tremendously, but there’s no time to hang our heads. He’s a big loss, but we have all the pieces we need in this room.”
In the end, though, the biggest missing piece at Virginia is its own NCAA tournament history, a burden the Cavaliers have to reckon with even if they had little or nothing to do with the Syracuse meltdown or the ugly 65-39 loss last season against Florida in the second round or getting exposed by Michigan State in this same building three years ago when they entered the NCAA tournament 29-3 and couldn’t even make it to the second weekend.
“Of course, that’s always in the back of your mind,” junior center Jack Salt said. “You want to give Coach Bennett a good team that gets to that historic stage, but to get there, as hard as it is, you can’t be focused on it. Especially right now. It can be used as motivation in the summer, but right now we need to lock in for Friday.”
As always, the Cavaliers will keep knocking. But given the opportunity they earned by going 31-2 this season, it’s time to finally kick the door down.