They might not want to admit it, but for many members of the Virginia men’s basketball team, the end of this season and the prospect of starting another must be a relief.
There are some obvious players for whom this may hold true. Freshman Sylven Landesberg has to be looking forward to getting a little more help next year. One would think sophomore Mustapha Farrakhan is looking for a fresh start after riding the bench for much of the year — again. Fellow sophomore Jeff Jones must be excited about a potential season in which he never has DNP next to his name. Senior Mamadi Diane finally got his 1,000 career points after riding the bench much of his final season, and he, along with senior Tunji Soroye, are probably ready to move on.
You can, however, be guaranteed of this: No one is more ready to redeem himself and his team after the past season than junior Calvin Baker.
As the Wahoo nation vented its frustrations about Virginia’s sometimes unbearable performances, Baker often was the focal point. While Virginia’s poor sequences were numerous all season, Baker’s were the most obvious and often the most puzzling. He was booed at home by fans and he was slammed on message boards. When Virginia coach Dave Leitao was criticized for overvaluing experience on a losing team, Baker’s name was among the first ones mentioned.
I don’t agree with Leitao about everything, but when it comes to Baker, I absolutely take Leitao’s side. Baker’s game isn’t pretty, but the good outweighs the bad.
First, let me recognize the bad. He does not have the ball-handling ability of an ACC point guard. His turnovers are not only numerous — 2.5 per game to be exact, including seven conference games with four turnovers or more — but also diverse. At any moment, he might step out of bounds or travel with no one around. He often tries to “thread the needle” with his passes, as the cliche goes, but the needle ends up stuck in the fabric seemingly as often as it makes it through. As his arm flies out to an absurd degree, he shoots sub-40 percent from the field and sub-30 percent from three-point range, which includes floaters in the lane and NBA-range threes that could end up hitting any part of the basket, backboard included. And, most painful of all to a guy like me who loves the pure point guard, he is too selfish in transition — rather than dishing to a teammate in a numbers-up situation, he just loves to pull up for a 12-15 foot jumper.
In other words, he does a lot that just makes you go, ‘What is this guy thinking?’ — as a point guard, mind you.
So why does he play? Because he has an upside, much of which isn’t measurable by numbers.
His scoring isn’t terrific — he was third on the team at 8.4 points per game — and his shooting percentage doesn’t help. But, the way he scores cannot be undervalued. Other than Landesberg, he was the only Cavalier who could regularly get into the teeth of the defense — a quality desperately needed in Leitao’s offense, which relies heavily on dribble penetration.
And yes, his 39.2 percent shooting is poor — but then again, the majority of guys on this team cannot brag that theirs was better. Four players who had at least four shots per game, in fact, had percentages worse than Baker — Farrakhan, Jones, Diane and freshman Sammy Zeglinski — all of whom also averaged fewer points. So despite the shooting percentage, the fact that Baker could get his team a bucket here and there was certainly a plus for the often scoring-starved Cavs.
On defense, Baker was also up and down — but when it was up, it was way up. When Leitao went to man-to-man on defense, he often assigned Baker to D-up the opposing team’s best guard. In Virginia’s 62-55 loss to Miami, he played Jack McClinton — who is third in the ACC at 19.3 points per contest — nearly perfectly, holding him to 11 points on 3-of-10 shooting. Had McClinton missed one of his few open looks of the night — a three that put the Hurricanes up five with under a minute remaining — we might be talking about how Baker’s defense won the game.
But Baker’s most important quality is one that is entirely intangible: passion. He doesn’t just leave all of his energy on the floor, but his heart and soul along with it. If Baker could leave a kidney in exchange for a win, he’d probably do that too.
The only way to prove this point is by results. Through the first half of the ACC season, as Virginia was getting embarrassed both at home and on the road, Leitao claimed the problem was that his team wasn’t into the game. His Cavaliers needed energy and were lacking in passion, he cried. They needed to change how they approached the way they were playing.
It sure sounded like a whole lot of coach-speak. A reaction I often heard was, “How about a few good players instead?”
The player who most often preached Leitao’s sentiment, both on the court and in postgame interviews, was Baker; the thing about it, though, is it made him all the easier to criticize. How can a guy who hands the ball over in gift-wrapping to the opposing team turn around and get on his teammates for not playing hard enough?
But with the manner in which Virginia began to pick up wins, Leitao and Baker proved the point. The turnaround began when he threw in a revamped starting lineup for the second half against Boston College, which included the seldom-used junior Solomon Tat at power forward and Baker at point. Talent-wise, it certainly wasn’t the best five Virginia had to offer; sophomore Mike Scott, for instance, found himself coming off the bench in subsequent games. But, as Leitao put it, “I wasn’t really interested in playing anybody who wasn’t [going to] play the game the right way.”
With Baker as the emotional leader of this group, Virginia first started getting competitive, and then started winning. Leitao started essentially the same starting lineup for the remainder of the season, taking three of its four conference wins, and remaining competitive in nearly every game the rest of the way.
The only exception was a blowout loss at Clemson March 3, a 75-57 defeat. And it was this blip against Clemson in Virginia’s overall positive trend to end the season that presented a microcosm of Baker’s value to the team.
He first showed that knack for scoring, keeping his team in the game during the first half, hitting 5-of-7 field goals for 12 first-half points, including nine of Virginia’s first 11.
Baker can create his own offense, but he is no offensive juggernaut, and he predictably did not match those first half numbers in the second. He went cold and his teammates continued to play poorly, as Clemson opened up the half with a 28-9 run.
During that stretch, Baker was livid. After making a typically head-scratching turnover — he picked up his dribble at half-court and got tied up by a Clemson defender — he slammed the ball on the floor in frustration and got called for a technical foul. Oh, Calvin.
Then, in an ensuing timeout, Baker went off. Though my media seat was across the gym from the Virginia huddle, Baker was obviously crucifying his teammates. His angry gestures had his arms flying in all directions as he yelled and screamed his frustrations.
This happened after he cost his team possession and two free throws after a technical foul that followed a turnover — it sure seemed a bit hypocritical. Just Calvin being Calvin.
But then, on senior day, Virginia rebounded with a win against Maryland and an emotional send-off for Diane.
Perhaps that tongue-lashing, and even the technical foul, as humorous as it may have been, was exactly the spark that Virginia needed. Yes, the turnover and the free throws were costly. But his emotion and the passion in that sequence, though not quantifiable, more than made up for two points and possession. After the game, I asked him if he regretted the technical, and he said absolutely not, because his team needed something to get them fired up.
That, in a nutshell, is Calvin Baker.
“Calvin, through thick and thin, has been booed at home, doesn’t always play pretty for a guy who’s playing out of position, and turns it over more than a point guard should,” Leitao said. “But he plays the game with heart and spirit. That’s what we’re trying to get from everybody, every game. So, the things that he does not do, I sometimes live with, because what I’m looking for, he’s one of the guys that gives it to us.”
So Wahoo fans, the next time you see Baker step out of bounds, or dribble off his foot, or pull up in the lane for a shot that hits nothing but backboard, hold your tongue. On a team filled with youth, if there is one guy players should look toward next year for fearless leadership and guidance about how to approach basketball the right way, they need look no further than Calvin Baker.
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