Virginia is doubling down on the style that brought Tony Bennett’s team a national title

For years, Virginia basketball detractors preached that while Tony Bennett’s slow it down and win with defense style clearly worked against familiar foes in the ACC, that blueprint for success could never produce six consecutive wins in the less predictable NCAA tournament.

Then, last March/April, a bunch of really wild shit happened and that argument was blown into the ether forever. There are videos of the whole thing on YouTube if you don’t believe me.

Virginia lost four starters from that team, including its only three double-figure scorers. Those departures left even the most adamant of Bennett believers wondering if it was possible for the Cavaliers to discover a formula in 2019-20 that could allow them to have even a shot at becoming college basketball’s first repeat national champion in over a decade.

For Bennett, that formula seems to be pretty clear: Double down and become even more Virginia than ever before.

It’s sort of like if a popular singer made an album where her songs were littered with cat sounds here and there and most of her fans hated it, but then said singer cleaned up at the Grammys. You know what’s happening on that singer’s next album? She’s doubling down on the cat sounds.

For Virginia, “doubling down on the cat sounds” means playing at an adjusted tempo just as slow as they did a year ago — 59.4 possessions per 40 minutes against the average Division-I team, easily the slowest pace in America once again — but ratcheting up the ridiculous defensive numbers.

Through six games, the Cavaliers lead Division I in points allowed per game (an absurd 42.6 points per game — the next best is Arkansas at 50 ppg) and adjusted defensive efficiency. UVA’s current Ken Pom defensive rating of 79.2 is not only the best in the country, but easily the best in the 20-year existence of Pomeroy’s site. The current record-holder is the team Virginia beat to claim its first national title, the 2018-19 Texas Tech Red Raiders. Chris Beard’s squad finished last season with a defensive rating of 84.1.

A 61-55 win over Vermont on Nov. 19 marks the only time this season Virginia has allowed an opponent to score 50 or more points, and the only time they’ve allowed the opposition to average better than 0.8 points per possession. The main reason for both those things happening was Catamounts star Anthony Lamb connecting on 7-of-14 attempts from beyond the arc and finishing with a season-high 30 points. Lamb is 6-for-38 from beyond the arc in Vermont’s other six games.

But the definitive win for this boa constrictor of a reigning national champion came last Sunday when UVA toppled Arizona State to win the Hall of Fame Tip-Off, the program’s seventh consecutive title in a November tournament.

Read these three facts all while remembering that this is a game Virginia won:

1. Virginia went nine minutes and 43 seconds without scoring a point during one stretch of the game.

2. The Cavaliers had just 48 points when the final buzzer sounded.

3. At one point in the game, Arizona State went on a 19-0 run.

These three things all happened against one of the most up-tempo teams in all of college basketball, and Virginia still found a way to win this game, 48-45.

While these numbers are astounding, they also shed light on some offensive deficiencies that will almost certainly need to be rectified if the Cavaliers are going to partake in some net-cutting once again this season.

Chief among those issues is the fact that UVA is currently shooting just 23.9 percent from three as a team. That’s good for 342nd-best out of 353 Division-I teams. Statistically, the team’s best three-point shooter has easily been senior forward Mamadi Diakite (53.8 percent), a man who was a career 28.1 percent three-point shooter coming into the year. Braxton Key, Kihei Clark and freshman Casey Morsell (the breakout star of the Arizona State win) have all had their moments so far this season, but all are going to have to up their accuracy from deep in order for the Cavaliers to have an offense capable enough to win games where UVA’s opponent is able to score more than 50 points.

Or maybe that’s all nonsense and Virginia is going to up its win total from last season by limiting all but five or six of its opponents to 45 points or fewer. At this point, that feels like as believable a bet as any in college basketball.