Virginia basketball is taking annoying to a new level this season

PITTSBURGH, Pa. -- There are two types of annoying in college basketball.

First, there’s the press, the kind mastered by Shaka Smart’s VCU teams and currently perfected by West “Press” Virginia. It forces opponents to constantly be on their toes, to always be thinking. But a press can be broken. That annoyance can be pushed to the side and flipped on its head with the easy buckets that come from quick thinking against the press.

Then there is Virginia annoying. Virginia annoying isn’t something that can be neutralized with flawless decision making. It leaves no opportunity for an opponent to get into a rhythm. It’s a slow death, where you incrementally lose hope, as the Cavaliers squeeze harder and harder like a boa constrictor. It may ease up to give you a split second of optimism, but that only makes the eventual outcome all the more excruciating.

It’s a technique exasperated Pitt coach Jamie Dixon described with a weary sound in his voice after the Panthers’ 64-50 loss to Virginia this past weekend.

“Get down early, get back in it and get down two at the half,” Dixon said. “Think we’re gonna play better and then obviously we didn’t.”

That win helped Virginia vault to No. 7 in the AP poll and gave it more ammunition for a run at the ACC title. And if the Cavaliers are to win this year’s national championship, after bowing out early in the last two NCAA Tournaments, both in upset losses to Michigan State, this win was the blueprint for how it will be done.

There were the usual indicators of a Virginia game that have allowed the Cavaliers to be so deadly in the past three years of the Tony Bennett era. The second-slowest team in the nation slowed the game down to an extreme. Pitt averages 67 possessions per game, according to KenPom.com. In this game, they finished with 54 possessions. Pitt, on its hostile home floor, couldn’t help but let UVA dictate the terms of the game.

And, of course, Virginia controlled shot selection.

“They got layups and they got threes, and we got mid-range jump shots that were contested,” Dixon said.

That’s Virginia annoying to the max.

The easy, perhaps lazy argument against Virginia as a National Championship contender, is that teams that play to deliberate styles can’t win in a tournament setting. But as ultra-slow Wisconsin proved last year in its run to the title game, that’s not accurate. Because as slow as the Badgers were, they were also incredibly efficient on offense. And it’s that component of the game that has Virginia in a position to finally break through.

Despite what the low scores would tell you, Virginia has never had a bad offense in its current run of success. But this is the Cavaliers’ best offense yet, ranking ninth in offensive efficiency, according to KenPom. In fact, their offense is even more efficient than their defense.

Perhaps the biggest reason for UVA’s success is that the Cavaliers are better at shooting than they were last year. This year’s team is hitting 41 percent of its three-pointers, good for 10th in the nation. Last year’s team ranked 125th at 35.2 percent. But it’s also a matter of shot selection.

As the shot charts from Shot Analytics suggest, not only is Virginia hitting more shots than last year, it’s getting better ones.

Last year’s Virginia team shot from pretty much anywhere on the floor. This year’s team is much better at creating shots it wants. The Cavaliers focus on getting threes and layups, but when the defense takes those away, they simply take the closest mid-range shot readily available. As a result, this year’s mid-range shots are taken closer to the basket, and the Cavaliers are hitting them at a higher percentage.

The defense is also creating offense. Bennett’s pack-line defense emphasizes forcing bad shots by minimizing risk. As a result, UVA has typically been worse at forcing turnovers than anything else defensively. However, this year, the Cavaliers have become much better at forcing turnover, while still sticking to their defensive principles.

Bennett-coached teams will never be turnover-forcing machines, and it won’t consistently play that way, but this team’s improved propensity to get easy possessions adds a whole new dimension to Virginia annoying.

Take the Pitt game. Virginia scored 20 points on 11 turnovers, a rate of 1.82 points per turnover. The Panthers actually scored a solid 1.28 points per possession when they didn’t turn it over, but those turnovers resulted in a paltry 0.93 points per possession.

This Virginia team doesn’t just annoy you with its defense and its excruciating tempo -- it takes its shot and takes the ball, too, with every resulting easy basket another squeeze of the chest for this constrictor of a team.

It’s Virginia annoying with a twist -- an elite offense that could carry this team deep into the NCAA Tournament.