Virginia 67, Boston College 55
The ACC win-loss seesaw Virginia has been riding continued Tuesday night.
Kihei Clark scored 19 points, and the Cavaliers took the lead from Boston College midway through the first half and never relinquished it in a victory at John Paul Jones Arena.
UVa (13-9, 7-5 ACC), which is now 9-0 following losses, had four players in double figures against the Eagles (9-12, 4-7).
Virginia got 17 points from Jayden Gardner, a career-high 13 from Kadin Shedrick, and 12 from Armaan Franklin. UVa went 26 of 29 at the free throw line on a night that it also went just 3 for 7 beyond the arc (its fewest attempts since also taking seven against Clemson in January 2016), though if you are only going to make three 3s, seven attempts is better than going 3 for 14, which was what the team shot from deep at Notre Dame on Saturday. The ‘Hoos also scored 20 points off 14 turnovers by the Eagles.
Coach Tony Bennett said having four players in double figures was “huge.”
“You can’t have all the weight on your defense,” he said. “The offense has to help out, and I thought it was a decent balance today, and to get those extra points … at the line and off turnovers was good.”
Jayden Gardner celebrates with Kadin Shedrick after putting the finishing touches on the win with a 3-point play. (Andrew Shurtleff/The Daily Progress)
Virginia got off to a slow start and found itself down 10-4 (though technically it was 11-4 after a BC 2-pointer was changed to a 3-pointer) at the under-16-minute timeout. It went six minutes without a field goal in the first 10 minutes of the game.
The first 10 minutes also continued an apparent trend of teams throwing up crazy shots at the end of the shot clock and making them. The first was made by DeMarr Langford Jr., and that was the shot that was called a 2-pointer and changed to a 3 at the next timeout. The second was a pretty deep 3 made by Brevin Galloway, who, of course, had missed 13 straight 3s before making that one. That shot kept BC in the lead 14-10. But Franklin immediately answered with a triple of his own on the other end, Reece Beekman forced BC’s Makai Ashton-Langford into a wild shot, and then Kody Stattmann gave UVa its first lead on a pair of made free throws after rebounding a Franklin miss.
Virginia opened up a 26-19 margin after Shedrick poked the ball away from Kanye Jones and Beekman found Clark for a transition 3. BC inched back to within 3, but Clark hit a floater on the baseline at the buzzer to send the ‘Hoos to the locker room with a 30-25 edge.
In the second half, they widened the advantage to 15 points on a few occasions and led by that margin with 4:30 remaining. But BC continued to fight and threatened to make it a 6-point game with two minutes left. Jaeden Zackery drove the lane and made a shot over Shedrick as a whistle was blown. The foul was not on Shedrick, though. Had that been the case, Zackery would’ve gone to the line with a chance to cut the deficit to 6. Instead, the call went against Zackery, who swung his elbow toward Shedrick as he was going up for the shot. A flagrant foul was called, and Shedrick made 1 of 2 free throws to make it a 10-point game.
If there was ever any real doubt after that, a minute later, with the Eagles down 8, Gardner missed two consecutive shots right at the rim but grabbed his own rebounds and then finally got one to go plus the foul. He made the free throw to make it 61-50 with 57 seconds left.
“I thought Jayden was padding his stats,” Bennett said. “They say Moses Malone used to do that – one, two, three offensive rebounds.”
Gardner finished with five rebounds, three assists, and two steals. He shot just 5 for 13 from the field but went 7 for 7 from the stripe.
Clark went 4 for 7 from the field and 10 for 10 from the line and added six rebounds. He didn’t have any assists and had three of Virginia’s nine turnovers.
More and more, Beekman has slid into the role as the primary distributor, and for good reason. The Wisconsin native didn’t score Tuesday but recorded seven assists, two steals (and Stattmann was credited with a steal when Beekman forced that wild shot I mentioned earlier), a rebound, and a block. His on-ball defense is superb, but his quickness and explosiveness have grabbed the fan base’s attention in addition to his improved 3-point shooting. In particular, the late dunk he made while being defended at Notre Dame on Saturday caught my eye.
“We actually had a real nice stretch where we separated in the second half with some quality offense,” Bennett said, “and I thought [Beekman] was kind of the maestro of that.”
Beekman is second in the ACC in assists per game (4.86) and first in assist-to-turnover ratio (3.69) and steals (2.18). He’s also 15th in the league with 0.82 blocks per game even though he is 6-foot-2. It would be cool to see him keep up a pace of at least 4.7 assists and 2.1 steals per game because only two ACC players have averaged those figures together over the course of a season, as noted during the ACC Network's broadcast: North Carolina’s Ty Lawson (2008-09) and Wake Forest’s Chris Paul, who actually did it twice (2003-04, 2004-05).
Franklin went 2 for 4 from beyond the arc, with both 3s coming at crucial times. I mentioned the first one earlier that came right after Galloway’s crazy trey, and Franklin’s other 3 came right after Zackery cut the lead to 10 with his own 3 with seven minutes remaining in the game, so that one pushed the advantage back up to 13. Franklin also went 3 for 6 on 2-pointers and added three boards.
Shedrick made 4 of his 7 shots and went 5 for 8 at the line. He also collected eight rebounds, two steals, and had an emphatic block in the game’s final minute. He came off the bench again but played 31 minutes compared to starter Francisco Caffaro’s 14, partially because Caffaro got popped in the nose in the second half and didn’t return. Bennett said that Caffaro could’ve returned if needed. Caffaro recorded 4 points, a rebound, and a steal.
Stattmann didn’t score beyond his two free throws but was credited with three steals, two boards, and two blocks. He’s not the most athletically gifted player, but he has a lot of years in Bennett’s system now and has been in the right place at the right time defensively more often recently, it seems like to me.
Virginia shot 44.2% from the field, while BC shot 40.4%. The Eagles went 12 for 12 from the line but just 5 for 23 beyond the arc. The rebounding battle was basically even, with Virginia grabbing 27 boards and BC 26.
Anarchy in the ACC
Once again, UVa bounced back from a loss and took care of business at home against an inferior opponent. After Wednesday’s ACC action — most notably, Clemson over Florida State and Notre Dame over Miami — the Cavaliers sit in sixth place in the ACC. They’ve got an 0-3 record against the teams ahead of them in the standings and a 7-2 record against the teams below them. Which side of say, eighth, will they finish on? The last stretch of the schedule is tougher, but everyone in the ACC is beatable — that much is clear.
“You can’t dwell too much on the past, because we’re in the ACC, and at this [point], anybody can beat anybody, right?” Clark said after Virginia beat BC, noting what his approach was after the loss to Notre Dame. “So you’ve just got to lock into the next game, forget about the past, and try to bounce back strong. That’s what good players do.”
Clark is absolutely right. In addition to just not getting much respect nationally at this moment, ACC basketball is also starting to resemble ACC football in its weirdness and chaotic nature.
Florida State beat Duke two weeks ago and seemed on its way to another strong ACC year. Then the Seminoles lost at last-place Georgia Tech by double digits and to Virginia Tech 85-72 at home, where they have been nearly unbeatable in recent years. Yes, the same VT team that barely cracked the 50-point barrier at UVa, lost to BC, and got its heart broken by Miami in Blacksburg, won in Tallahassee. With FSU’s loss at Clemson on Wednesday, the Seminoles have all of a sudden lost three straight. Meanwhile, after beating Virginia, Notre Dame scored 43 points at home in a loss to Duke on Monday. On Wednesday, the Irish flew down to Miami and won. Oh, and N.C. State has lost three consecutive contests after looking awesome versus the Wahoos.
With that craziness as a backdrop, and the fact that the ACC is predictable in its unpredictability, it’s no surprise that UVa hasn’t won two in a row since beating Syracuse and Clemson on Jan. 1 and 4. The Cavaliers will get their next chance when they host Miami on Saturday. With the loss to Notre Dame on Wednesday, the Hurricanes slipped into second in the ACC, half a game behind Duke, which they beat at Cameron Indoor Stadium a month ago, perhaps setting off all this conference madness. Six of the Hurricanes’ eight conference victories have been won by single digits, two of their ACC losses were 1-point setbacks versus Florida State, and the other was Wednesday’s 4-point setback versus Notre Dame. So Virginia will have to be ready for another close battle.
“It’s another test for us. It’s going to test us a lot,” Gardner said. “They really shoot the ball really well. So we have to trust our discipline to get to shooters.”
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