CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. – Virginia’s first season under Tony Bennett is just ending about the opposite of how it began. The Cavaliers at one point won eight in a row and stood 12-4 early in ACC play, and were the last team in the ACC to suffer their first conference loss. But as they head into their regular season finale, they have an eight-game losing streak and don’t look to be getting better.
Not many expected the Cavaliers to be a contender so quickly, although one figured they might be improved. Their final record might be a reasonable indicator of this team, that they are neither the team that was once 12-4 overall and 3-0 in the ACC nor the team that has lost eight in a row heading into the final game.
What has changed from the winning streak? The biggest place is at the offensive end, where it’s clear the Cavaliers don’t have much beyond Sylven Landesberg and Mike Scott. Landesberg has been the go-to guy and has had a fine season, shooting better in ACC play from long range than non-conference. Scott has often been the inside scorer to balance Landesberg out, but of late he was in a slump as he didn’t score in two straight games before a better effort against Boston College.
After that, you start to see why this team went south. Sammy Zeglinski might be the best case, as his shooting numbers are drastically down in ACC play. During the eight-game winning streak, he scored in double figures all but two games; during the current eight-game losing streak, he has done so just once and has gone scoreless twice, including his 0-6 outing against Boston College on Wednesday night.
“(Zeglinski) looks like his legs are gone and he’s really struggling to get the ball to the rim,” Bennett said. “I know that’s frustrating for a guy that was shooting the ball well early.”
Senior Jerome Meyinsse came alive of late, including a 21-point outing against Duke for his third straight double-digit, but he is a recent emergence and his college career is almost over. Jeff Jones has never lived up to his billing coming out of high school, and Mustapha Farrakhan has had a few double-digit scoring games this season but is shooting just under 36 percent from the field.
With the offense heading south, it’s been more difficult to win games. Up until a game before the losing streak began, they shot 50 percent or better from the field seven times. During this streak, they haven’t done that once. In the first seven games, they never shot above 38 percent.
The Cavaliers haven’t been a great defensive team all season, but in ACC play they are allowing opponents to shoot 45 percent from the field. That isn’t leaving much room for error, and although the Cavaliers turn the ball over just 11 times per game, they have had trouble pulling games out. During the current losing streak, five opponents shot over 47 percent, all in consecutive games.
Some of this was shown in the loss at Boston College. The Cavaliers never really got into much of a rhythm at the offensive end, so when they gathered some momentum, they weren’t able to keep it going for long. The Eagles opened up a 19-point lead early in the second half, and after that the Cavaliers never got closer than 12, and that was short-lived as the Eagles scored about 20 seconds later.
“You spend a lot of energy to get there, and I think too many times we do some things that are costly, whether it’s a turnover or a breakdown on the defensive end,” said Bennett. “That’s what we’ve been struggling with for a lot of this year.”
Bennett knows that their hot shooting earlier in the season covered up the other sins, and there’s room for improvement in several areas. The Cavaliers are likely somewhere in between the teams that showed up during the big streaks, so in the end their record isn’t likely to be very deceiving, if it ends up being deceiving at all. The difficulty will be that the season is ending much the opposite way it began, and it began positively.
