After losing its first ever ACC home game at the John Paul Jones Arena to Virginia Tech Wednesday, Virginia picked up its first conference victory and ended a three-game skid Saturday with an 84-66 win over Boston College.
After scoring 70 points or fewer? in each of their last three losses, the Cavaliers mounted their most balanced offensive effort of their young conference season in Saturday's win. Junior Mamadi Diane, senior Sean Singletary, senior Adrian Joseph and sophomore Calvin Baker each scored at least 15 points, with Diane leading all scorers with 20.
Singletary "needs help like everyone else, and he got it tonight," Boston College coach Al Skinner said. "We did not do a good job on Diane most of the night."
In addition to Singletary's 19 points, he also added 10 assists for his second consecutive double-double and the fourth of his career.
Singletary "was magnificent, and has been since the second half of the Duke game," Virginia coach Dave Leitao said. "One of the things we hadn't been doing was making shots, and we made shots today at good times."
On the Boston College side of the ball, junior Tyrese Rice and sophomore Shamari Spears provided the bulk of the offensive output for the Eagles. Rice led his team with 20 points, but shot just 6-16 from the floor and, even more uncharacteristically, went just 2-7 from the free-throw line. Spears, meanwhile, snared 11 rebounds while adding 13 points for a double-double of his own.
The rest of the Eagles, however, did not give Rice and Spears much help, as the team shot 38.7 percent from the floor. Virginia bounced back and forth between man-to-man and zone looks on defense to counter the Eagles' efficient flex offense, and Leitao's defensive scheme appeared to keep Boston College off-balance for most of the game.
"We tried some zone as much as anything to try to throw fastball-curveball, fastball-curveball," Leitao said. "We played defense well enough to get out and run."
The most troubling statistic for Boston College was its free-throw shooting. The Eagles, who normally convert 70.6 percent from the line, shot an abysmal 11-24 Saturday and missed four out of their first five in the second half as Virginia opened up a 15-point lead.
"I know I missed four free throws, and we missed a lot of free throws early in the second half," Rice said. "That led to some opportunities for them."
After the two teams battled to a 35-35 standstill in the first 20 minutes, the Cavaliers' offense took over in the final period. Led by Joseph, who made all of his 17 points in the second half, Virginia shot 53.3 percent from the field in the second to the Eagles' 37.9 percent. Coming out of the halftime break, Virginia opened with an 11-4 run, capped by a Diane-to-Joseph alley oop at the 17:18 mark that led to a Boston College time out.
Skinner's efforts to regain his team's poise were fruitless, however, as Virginia continued to add to the lead, extending the margin to 15 with 12 minutes remaining. The Eagles cut the deficit to as little as eight with 7:15 remaining, but Virginia scored five unanswered points and never let the lead sink below double digits in the final minutes.
The Cavaliers' next stop is in Tallahassee on Wednesday for a matchup with Florida State, before they return to Charlottesville for a meeting with Georgia Tech Sunday.
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