Virginia set to defend NCAA title
Champion Cavaliers uniquely positioned
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Mamadi Diakite is hunched over in a plastic chair, trying to bite his tongue. He doesn’t want to make any kind of major proclamations about the Virginia basketball team this season, despite how he might feel about it.
“All I can say is, it’s going to be a very surprising year, for many people,” Diakite tells USA TODAY Sports with a smile. “But I’m not going to say anything. A man doesn’t talk a lot. You just do it on the court. So we’ll see everyone on the court.”
“We’ll see” is perhaps an appropriate motto for the Cavaliers entering the 2019-20 season. Following their first national championship, a thrilling and affirming achievement for coach Tony Bennett and his program, Virginia watched its top three scorers – Kyle Guy, De’Andre Hunter and Ty Jerome – leave for the NBA draft while a fourth key contributor (big man Jack Salt) exhausted his eligibility.
That degree of roster turnover would create challenges anywhere. For the Cavaliers, whose recruiting philosophy generally runs counter to that of the Atlantic Coast Conference blue bloods, those challenges become even more daunting.
This isn’t Duke or North Carolina, where a cavalcade of five-star recruits are on the way to replace the key players who left. This is a Virginia program that has generally eschewed raw talent in favor of finding players who fit its culture and developing them over time – or, as ESPN analyst and former Virginia Tech coach Seth Greenberg described it, “(getting) old and (staying) old.”
“(But now) they really haven’t been able to stay old,” Greenberg said. “And their system is a process. It’s going to take time for these young players to understand how they want to play.”
Guy, Hunter and Jerome – who are now members of the Kings’, Hawks’ and Suns’ organizations in the NBA, respectively – accounted for 61% of Virginia’s scoring a year ago and played nearly half of the team’s total minutes. The only returners who averaged more than 20 minutes per game are Diakite, a fifthyear senior who grew up in Guinea, and Kihei Clark, a sophomore point guard from California.
Clark and Diakite were the two central figures in the most iconic sequence of Virginia’s championship run, when the former passed the ball to the latter for a tying, buzzer-beating shot in the Elite Eight against Purdue. Yet they are also emblematic of the blueprint that Virginia used to get to that point – Clark as a former three-star recruit who had previously committed to UC-Davis, and Diakite as a four-star prospect who made one start in his first three years at the school.
Associate head coach Jason Williford said the Cavaliers have been deliberate in their recruiting over the years, searching for players from a wide variety of locations and backgrounds who share a few key traits, including a willingness to sit, learn and develop rather than clamor for starting minutes right away. He said the development component has allowed Virginia to keep pace with other schools in the ACC that might have higher-rated recruiting classes or more raw talent.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be five-stars. It doesn’t necessarily have to be four-stars. But you can get good enough talent (at Virginia) as long as you can get them to their junior and senior years,” Williford said. “And so I guess our blueprint has been develop talent that can compete at this level, but also recruit good character and guys that are going to be here, that are three- and four-year guys.”
Virginia has successfully recruited just one five-star prospect (Guy) since Bennett arrived in 2009. Duke, by comparison, has welcomed 18 five-star recruits in the past five recruiting cycles alone, according to 247 Sports.
That’s not intentional, Williford said, but rather a byproduct of how the Virginia staff operates. They don’t promise minutes, or starting roles, or a highscoring, up-tempo system – the types of things a one-and-done recruit might be looking for.
In fact, Braxton Key, a transfer from Alabama, said he was told up front that he probably wouldn’t play significant minutes right away when he joined the team last year. And while it was difficult to cope with at times, he said he came to appreciate the benefit of picking teammates’ brains and absorbing the system.
“You just kind of watch, and you get better and better and better,” Key said. “You might not play that year, and that’s OK. But you have to trust the process and know that the next year could be your year, or the year after.”
Part of the watching-and-waiting is about Bennett’s notorious pack line defense, a relatively unique scheme that can take time to master.
But part of it is also about capitalizing on the attributes that typically come with veteran-laden teams. Virginia, for example, led the country last year in both scoring defense and fewest turnovers per game.
“Elite players who are freshmen – the five-stars – they can do most everything at an ‘A’ level. But they’re young. That gets them,” Diakite said. “I don’t know what they teach them, but they tend to turn the ball over sometimes. They take some difficult shots while you have the easy shot you can take first.”
Although the Cavaliers aren’t adding a Vernon Carey Jr. or a Cole Anthony, they are excited about several of their newcomers. Diakite said he’s been impressed by Kody Stattmann, a sophomore from Australia who played sparingly last year, and freshman guard Casey Morsell, a four-star recruit who earned Gatorade Player of the Year honors in Washington, D.C., last year. Tomas Woldetensae, a junior college transfer originally from Italy, could also be pressed into a significant role.
“Defensively,” Diakite added, “I feel like we’re looking much better than last year.”
The question is whether those newcomers can produce right away for a program that has traditionally been content to let them sit back and wait.
“They lost a lot of shot-makers, man,” said Greenberg, who observed a Virginia practice in early October. “Now everyone’s role has changed. Diakite’s role has changed. Kihei Clark’s role has changed. Braxton Key’s role has changed . ... So I think this will be a challenge.”
Though it’s difficult to replace the core of a team in the span of a few months, Williford doesn’t ever see Virginia becoming the type of program that relies on one-and-done recruits, as Duke and Kentucky have increasingly been willing to do.
Nor has Virginia’s recruiting philosophy changed.
“We’re going to get who we’re supposed to get, regardless of stars,” Williford said. “We’re just going to get kids that fit our culture. And we’re not going to change that formula.”