Category: 2023-2024

Well, then. There’s a lot to write about after that past season… and I’m going to do a much longer “State of The Program” type piece in a little while after some of the initial declarations into the portal happen. That being said, a good place to start, as I did last year, is to…

There’s a lot to process after the ACC Tournament, some best left for later so that we can focus on the now. I wasn’t planning on doing a recap of these games because of the crushing nature of the N.C. State loss and, to be honest, once the season is over extensive game break downs…

Esteemed readers, after a long regular season filled with pretty extreme ups and downs, I bring you a Cuts from The Corner article that’s all about good vibes heading into tournament play. In a likely must-win game for our NCAA Tournament hopes, we won this one comfortably, secured the #3 seed in the ACC Tournament…

As a UVa basketball blog I have to admit, gentlefolk, that I’m feeling a bit discouraged at the moment. On one hand, if you were to go back to the beginning of the season and tell fans that we’d have secured a double-bye in the ACC Tournament with a chance to be the #3 seed…

It’s funny how sometimes a re-watch can change your perspective on the same outcome. At the end of that game I felt thankful that we won, but also very frustrated that we rode about 1/4th of the game with some pretty fragile lineups; risking the season with some of them. Also that we didn’t go…

On Saturday we held UNC, averaging close to 80 points per game, to 54 points… and lost by 10. This on the back of a 16-point first half, after scoring 41 points at Virginia Tech and 49 points vs. Wake Forest. So, what’s the deal with our offense? Is it the system? Is it the…

Losing by 34 points on the road to your in-state rivals stings. Flatly, it’s a terrible look. The offense was bad. The defense was bad. The energy was bad. But, when that sting fades, you have to ask yourself the question, “what happened?” It’s a hard question to answer when everyone plays that badly because…

I’m going to miss watching Reece Beekman and Ryan Dunn play in the Blue and Orange (or, really, Penn State’s uniforms but you get me). Ryan Dunn took over a game defensively about as much as one player can and Beekman was dominant on both ends of the floor in a game that felt like…

Old habits die hard or, in some cases, not at all. So it was in this game as we went back to sitting Jordan Minor for all but 8 minutes, playing without a Center for almost half the game, sitting Reece Beekman after his third foul and, most glaringly, resuming our aggressive hedge strategies from earlier…

I don’t often talk about officiating on here, certainly not to any great length, because I think it’s a pretty pointless exercise. You can’t control officiating and my main goal is not whether we “deserved” to win or lose in any specific contest; it’s to think about the team and to discuss areas that went well,…

One of the most enjoyable things about the CTB tenure over the years is when we just absolutely break the will of a team through our defense. Yes, I’m talking about holding Harvard to 27 points back in 2014, but I’m more talking about snatching the morale of one of your conference rivals and watching them…

Here’s hoping our guys are up for the short turnaround more than your friend at CfTC is… because this was a crunch and I wasn’t able to get to everything I wanted to. What a big win on the road (Quad 1!) against a team that presented the kind of size mismatches I’d been concerned about…

In our second revenge game of the season, we were able to improve by a 34-point differential, beating Notre Dame by 12 after losing by 22 on the road. We improved our rebounding margin by 10 and forced 18 turnovers en route to holding the Fighting Irish to 53 total points despite 50% shooting from three. Notre…

That was a welcome and convincing victory in a must-win game that, prior to, brought with it more dread than anticipation. Quickly that feeling melted away after an 11-0 run to start the game with the good guys barely looking back the rest of the contest. But, what do you take from a game like that where…

I just wrote a piece focusing on each of our five starting guys and how they all work together, supposing that was the starting five that we’d be seeing for a while. Literally one game later, Andrew Rohde played just 12 minutes, by far his lowest total of the season, and we’re once again up in…

A very important win on the road to, hopefully, build confidence and momentum away from the JPJ (and to stop adding losses to the resume). It was a game where we started to, likely, get a more cemented look of how CTB wants the team to settle into the final half of the season. Four of our…

Hoos ready to watch some pick and rolls?!?!?? End article, roll clips…. Okay, there is a little more to talk about than that, but it’s notable that, while I’ve been calling for some significant changes on the offensive end, we seemed to approach this game by simplifying. It worked well, coupled with some continued roster changes/availability that, don’t…

If you haven’t had a chance to listen to CTB’s postgame comments after the Wake game, especially his off-the-cuff description of what it means to keep working through adversity and maintain team culture when things aren’t going well, it’s worth a listen. It’s the kind of leadership that can pull you through a stretch like this…

I had to sit with this one for a little bit. This has been a uniquely rough stretch for the program during at least the recent CTB era. In the past, we’ve suffered some bad blow out losses to good teams, and we’ve also lost close contests to teams that weren’t very good; but we haven’t…

Happy New Year my lovely UVa hoops enthusiasts!  This was about as interesting of a game as I could have expected in a 24-point blowout at home against a bad team. Level of competition is always important to consider and, despite Louisville being a historically great team and an ACC conference opponent, they’re currently Kenpom’s 205th…

Well, there is nothing to sugar coat from that contest. I sat after the game in stunned silence for a while attempting to process what I’d just watched prior to a (shudder) re-watch. Sometimes you’ll see CTB coached teams get blown out by high quality opponents. Sometimes you’ll see them lose to opponents they shouldn’t. Rarely to almost never…

It’s funny how so often after games like this I think to myself, “Okay… but what’s worth talking about?” And then I continually find myself struggling with what to cut after I’ve clipped. This is the kind of game where we get more implications than we do conclusions, but there are still things that do translate, and…

This game was notable because it was a continuation of similar issues we faced against Northeastern; we just ran into an opponent who punished us worse. There were woes across the board and this is going to be a Cuts focusing mostly on problematic areas as a result. Memphis pressured us, sped us up, played good both…

Well. That was a game that happened. One of the goals of this blog is to highlight the “whys” through video, after each game and to tackle things that both caused the immediate result and that might have a longer-term impact on what to expect moving forward. It’s a hard thing to do when most of the reasoning…

This was a fun game and there are fun things to write about afterward! It really wasn’t as close as the 30 point differential – at one point if you doubled the scores, it would have been 100-36 until we started emptying the bench. After I watch the game live, I typically try to think…

The Heater Game? Maybe not because, hopefully, we’ll have more games where we’ll shoot that well, but it was fantastic to see so many guys get into a rhythm from outside. This was a convincing win that carried a 33-point margin in the second half before we relied heavily on our bench for roughly the…

Hello, friends, there’s so much to talk about! I’m having an especially hard time editing myself… and I always have a hard time editing myself! This was a great and very encouraging win against a team whose offensive was 4th in the country coming into the game and who represented the best offensive rebounding team…

Man, I’m glad they got the heck out of Fort Myers with a 1-1 record! This was not their best basketball hampered by health, poor shooting, and some growing pains for the roster. It’s the kind of series you hope to escape with the best result possible, no matter how ugly, and regroup. Fortunately, we…

Woof. What do you take away from a game like that? Firstly, I’ll say that I don’t think Wisconsin that much of a better team (if at all) than Florida. They asked tough questions, played very soundly, and we played terribly and seemed a little shell-shocked. There really weren’t any answers coming off of that…

I’m going to get a little defensive today…. I am not a website designer, all! I’m simply a guy who loves UVa and hoops and who wants to share that in detail with anyone who wants to come along for the ride. Frankly, it took significant outside technological intervention just to get my video formatting…

Well, hello. Let’s all have a collective moment of silence for Isaac McKneely’s ankle and hope it finds a speedy recovery. Really, that’s the most important thing from games like this – health. Breath officially held. While it’s good that he didn’t brake it, sometimes brakes are easier to recover from than sprains, so it…

Apologies for the delay on this one, as I realize most are already looking forward to Tuesday, but I was there for a great win for setting the table for the rest of the season, so I hope the wait will have been worth it. In general, I thought that we played tough, with a…

I’m. So. Excited! Year two of Cuts from The Corner kicks off and, once again lovely readers, we have fresh cuts for the viewing from our UVa men’s basketball team! At the beginning of a season, I like to ease in with some general likes and dislikes – typically a little more scattershot because so…

Another Blue/White internal scrimmage in the books. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it out this year, but I have combed the highlights, digested the first-person accounts, checked the PBP, and have a few quick thoughts. It’s such a small sample-size that we are prone to over-analyzing because of the dearth of tangible assessment over…

Potential is one of those loaded words. For players, it’s their ultimate ceiling if everything comes together: their knowledge of the game, their skill, their strength and conditioning to become the best (or as close as they can) version of themselves. It’s hard to objectively calculate because it’s impossible to fully know, and when people…

We now reach the last and, judging by my communications with many of you, likely the most anticipated of my four pieces reviewing our four transfers incoming to the program this season; Andrew Rohde. If you’d like to review the others, Dante Harris, Jordan Minor, and Jacob Groves, can be found following their respective links.…

We move now into Part 3 of my offseason spotlight on incoming transfers, Jacob Groves from Oklahoma. Previously, I’ve done Dante Harris and Jordan Minor and will now focus on what we might expect to see from the 6’9″ stretch PF. As part of a member of the Big 12, Groves played against some of…

Ahead we move to Part 2 of my offseason incoming transfer spotlight. Last time we focused on Dante Harris and what he brings to the table as the potential primary ball-handler for us this season. In this piece, we’ll tackle Jordan Minor. How does the Northeastern Conference Co-Player of the Year and Defensive Player of…

Alright! Back to my favorite part of all of this which is combing through tape. Unlike last season where there was just one transfer coming in (Ben Vander Plas), we have four coming in this year so I’m going to have a lot of writing ahead of me! I’ll do one of these for each…

Welcome to Part 3 and the final installment of this offseason series reviewing opportunities for improvement. Part 1 about our redshirting strategy and Part 2 about our use of the transfer portal can be found in those respective links. Today I’m going to focus on a fairly loaded topic: playing time. The topic is loaded…

This is Part 2 in my post-season series of opportunities for improvement moving forward. If you’d like to read Part 1, which was about our redshirting process (and some of that content will be referenced in this article), it can be found here. It’s a tough topic to discuss comprehensively because, as of this moment,…

Phew! What a whirlwind of an offseason so far. Hopefully you’ve now read my self-assessment/lessons learned from 2022-2023 here. Building off of that, and what we’ve seen across the college basketball landscape both last year and seasons prior, we’re going to have some more “Commentary From The Corner” where I just discuss the areas in…