Basketball games, Interim Coach Ron Sanchez reckons, are like boxing matches. Some go 12 rounds. Relenting after 11 means accepting defeat.
“You can’t choose to fight 11,” Sanchez said Wednesday night, after Virginia lost 64-62 to No. 21 Memphis. “Because if you do, you’ll get knocked out. And today, Memphis made their run, and they tried to knock us out and we kept fighting.”
Virginia had not withstood those knockout attempts over the previous six weeks of the season. Ranked teams — No. 1 Tennessee, then-No. 22 St. John’s, No. 7 Florida — had thrown haymakers, and Virginia stumbled out of the ring after just five rounds, or six or maybe seven.
Manageable deficits snowballed into blowouts of rather large proportions. There was the 64-42 loss to the Volunteers, then the 80-55 loss to the Red Storm and later the 87-69 loss to the Gators. In the games against Tennessee and Florida, Virginia played solid first halves, trailing by one and four points, respectively, at halftime. It was only in the second half that utter capitulation arrived.
And so two buzzwords, the past couple weeks, have emerged in the locker room and the practice gym — toughness and competitive endurance.
“That’s that competitive endurance that we’re talking about,” Sanchez said Wednesday after the Memphis game. “We had some tough plays down the stretch.”
Virginia lost to Memphis. But at least, and at last, Virginia’s players showed an abundance of those two things, the two buzzwords.
What is toughness? Toughness is senior guard Taine Murray, after failing to score just six days prior in 26 minutes against Bethune-Cookman, dropping 14 points on 5-9 shooting in 26 minutes. Memphis’s scouting report, according to Coach Penny Hardaway, bore no mention of the industrious senior. But there he was, selling a fake early, driving, flushing a two-handed dunk. And there he was, finishing through contact with five minutes left, preserving hope in a nine-point game.
Toughness is redshirt freshman center Anthony Robinson, entering the game early because the two players ahead of him in the rotation picked up two fouls, defending a behemoth, senior forward Dain Dainja, and forcing a miss on his first possession. Robinson drove and drew a foul on the next play.
Competitive endurance is junior forward Elijah Saunders, keeping Virginia in the game late. Memphis surged ahead to a seven-point lead with 2:28 left, and things looked over and done with. But then, out of a timeout, Saunders drilled a three-pointer to keep things close, backpedaling before it even went down.
“This game we played for longer,” Saunders said. “We kept it close the whole game.”
After it all, though, Memphis proved to be too much. Yes, there were bright moments — the Tigers, which entered as the nation’s second-best three-point shooting team, could only muster a 2-14 first-half showing from deep. But these bright moments never felt like they would last.
The Memphis team eventually awakened, hitting three three-pointers in the final 7:15. Sophomore guard PJ Haggerty, the crown jewel of a vaunted backcourt, scored 27 points, while the indefatigable Dainja banged his way to 12 points and 11 rebounds.
On the other side of the ball, the turnover bug visited the Cavaliers. They surrendered seven of their 11 turnovers in the second half, three of the seven and five of the 11 coming from junior guard Andrew Rohde, who panicked when faced with double teams.
Turnovers have plagued Virginia all season. But they, and everything else, looked better Wednesday, and against a much better opponent than the Bethune-Cookman outfit that threatened Virginia in its previous game.
Sanchez entered his postgame press conference after that Bethune-Cookman game insistent about one thing.
“It’s a mindset,” Sanchez said. “It’s a mentality. I think it’s a level of toughness.”
Not five minutes later, into the room came freshman forward Jacob Cofie.
“I feel like we’re lacking toughness right now,” Cofie said. “When we play better teams, that will definitely hurt us a lot.”
Freshman guard Ishan Sharma, for his part, used the phrase “competitive endurance” after the Bethune-Cookman game.
Clearly, Sanchez’s postgame address, delivered to the players just before he meets with the media, centered on a specific theme. Two themes, perhaps, ones that go hand in hand.The players, it seems, are excellent parrots of their head coach.
That is good news for Virginia. After all, Sanchez’s primary mission seems to be coaxing his players to internalize the dogma about playing tough and enduring the whole game.
He maintains, even as outsiders deride the team as unathletic and lacking skill, that the roster contains enough talent. There is nothing, at any rate, that anyone can do at this point about the talent level. The only option is to maximize it by following those two buzzwords.
“We battled for 40 minutes,” Sanchez said Wednesday, “which is a big step for us.”
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