.gif "St. Francis (NY)")
There wasn’t much to learn from this game that we couldn’t also have learned from watching our guys shoot over the long, padded pole that the managers gently contest shots with in practice.
St. Francis was a kiddie pool swimmer suddenly dropped into the deep end. I would imagine that if their morale manages to survive a third consecutive road game against a top-100 foe against Providence on Monday, they’ll be glad to play 344th-ranked Savannah State at the end of next week. At least the guarantee checks probably look pretty good.
Knowing that they were outmanned and outgunned to the extent that they might never score if they attempted to run an offense, Glenn Braica had his charges run one pick and roll and then immediately hork up a three if it didn’t work, an interesting tactic for a team that shot 30.8% from deep in their opener against NC State and ranked 329th in the country in three point percentage last season.
It didn’t work. The Terriers went 1–16 from behind the arc in the first half and finished 5–26, shooting 22.9% overall. St. Francis’s 32 points were the fewest we’ve allowed since we held Georgia Tech to 28 in January of 2015 and their 51.6 efficiency mark was the stingiest defensive efficiency mark we’ve posted since holding Harvard to 45.5 in December of ’14.
Only one player from each team hit double figures in scoring. Unfortunately, St. Francis only had two guys make more than one shot and we had 10 of them. In addition to Nichols’s 11, Reuter scored nine, Shayok, London, and Diakite scored eight each, and Jack Salt scored six.
The big story going into the game was the big debut of Austin Nichols and Mamadi Diakite in Virginia uniforms. Both new bigs started slow (combining for four fouls in short first half stints), but things heated up later. Nichols made a nifty move for a hook shot and a foul and threw a couple of dunks down in the second half en route to the aforementioned team-high 11 points off the bench. Diakite — can I first say how much fun it is to watch him spring into the air while seemingly expending little to no effort? — scored his eight, grabbed four rebounds, made one magnificent block where he met the ball on his downward flight, and committed a very freshman-like four fouls in 14 minutes. Both looked very happy to be on the court instead of in street clothes or warmups.
It’s hard to take much from a game like this against this kind of competition. It’s best to just enjoy the highlights and move on to the next one. There were some: it was fun to see Guy curl for a couple of sweet jumpers and Ty Jerome make a couple of sharp passes for easy baskets. It was fun to see all of our bigs (Isaiah, Salt, Reuter, Nichols, and Diakite) all throw down at least one dunk on the much smaller Terriers. It was fun to see Justice Bartley crack the scoring column for the first time. It was less fun to see us go 0–9 on threes (London went 0–5; UVa and NC State went a combined 1–16 from the arc against St. Francis) and 10–16 from the line, but luckily, it didn’t matter or even come close to mattering. We could have missed all 16 free throws and still won by 30.
Yale, who pulled a minor upset of Washington on the road on Sunday, is up next.
