As the final seconds of last year's ACC Tournament game between Virginia and Duke ticked away, I was jubilant, delighted and - dare I say - ecstatic. It wasn't because my beloved Wahoos had only lost to the No. 1-seeded Blue Devils by 11 points, nor was it because the roller-coaster ride of a season had finally come to a halt. It was because I saw potential. I saw a top-25 team with budding ACC players of the year. I saw All-Americans and first-round NBA draft picks. But most importantly, I saw a team that could win.
Without our star - Sylven Landesberg - Mike Scott finished with a double-double and Jeff Jones played up to the standards of Duke's big three - Singler, Scheyer and Smith - by dropping 15 points. Those were the signs of a young team maturing, a team that would be scary in next year's mediocre ACC. And with a top-20 recruiting class coming into Charlottesville, the possibilities in my mind were endless. But now, as I look back at the Cavaliers' 12 losses through February of this year - including seven against a terrible ACC - I wonder where it all went wrong.
The collapse of my Virginia "Dream Team" began at the beginning of April, when three key pieces to the puzzle decided to leave U.Va. The NBA was calling 2008-09 ACC Rookie of the Year Landesberg, while the inconsistent but talented Jeff Jones and 2008-09 Mr. Virginia Basketball, Tristan Spurlock, left for other reasons. Despite the outflow of talent, I still felt that the Wahoos would have a successful season in the immediate future.
The next piece of bad news arrived Oct. 19 - Zeglinski would miss eight weeks because of knee surgery. A leader on the team and probably its best shooter, the absence of Zeglinski would be tough to overcome. But being the optimist that I am, I remained positive. Maybe one of the six incoming freshmen would step up, I thought. On the night freshman Billy Baron, son of Rhode Island coach Jim Baron, scored 19 points against William & Mary - 15 of them coming from beyond the arc - more bad news arrived.
During Tony Bennett's post-game interview, the coach announced what many Cavalier basketball fans had expected - talented freshman big man James Johnson would be redshirted. Even though I understand the value of redshirting, the impatient part of me wanted Johnson to play now. In the back of my mind, the thought of an injury occurring to one of the few, experienced big men remained.
Sure enough, Will Sherrill injured his right fibula in a great win against ranked Minnesota. Although the injury kept Sherrill out for only six weeks, I learned that as a Virginia basketball fan, I have to take the good with the bad. Before Sherrill even returned to the court, the Cavalier frontcourt took yet another blow - Scott would undergo arthroscopic knee surgery. Less than a month later, the news was announced that the senior, who was averaging a double-double before his surgery, would be out for the year. There really was nothing that could make this basketball season much worse for the Wahoos.
But less than a month ago, Baron announced that he was leaving the program, understandably wanting to play for his father at Rhode Island. Even with Baron's minimal playing time during ACC play, I still hoped Bennett was just saving the sharpshooting guard for the end of the year.
So the questions beg to be asked: Why have four top-talent players left the basketball program at U.Va in the past year? Why was Johnson - a talent certainly capable of making an immediate impact on a depleted Virginia frontcourt - redshirted? And most importantly, why are we not winning? Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski and Bennett all understand the rough realities of college hoops coaching. Building a program takes time, especially in the ever-demanding ACC. It took Smith six years to take North Carolina to the NCAA Tournament, and even Coach K - the second-winningest coach in college basketball history - needed four years to get Duke to the Big Dance.
So even though Bennett could succumb to the demands of his players threatening to transfer, play all of his freshman regardless of their readiness or push his injured players to play through the pain, Bennett is creating a system. It's a self-sustaining system to build a basketball program that competes for championships year in and year out, rather than a hot-and-cold team that rises and falls with the talent of its stars. Patience and perseverance now translate to wins down the road. And even if my U.Va. "Dream Team" won't materialize in the immediate future, I have a strange feeling that it is coming.
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