This year was going to be different. Sure, point guard Sharneé Zoll graduated, but juniorguard Monica Wright was just starting to bloom into a national star. Senior forward Lyndra Littles and senior center Aisha Mohammed would supplement Wright, and up-and-comers were going to provide support as they matured into contributors.
Despite being ranked higher than it was last season, though, the women’s basketball team walked away with an ending that could be difficult to describe as anything but disappointingly similar.
Where did the team go wrong? How did the most promising season in years fall apart down the line into quick exits from both the ACC and NCAA Tournaments?
Let’s start by looking at the season’s high point, which also happens to be its beginning: the big Nov. 17 upset against reigning national champion Tennessee, 83-82.
In Knoxville, the team set up the dynamic that would continue through the first half of December: Wright was the go-to player, scoring 35 points, but the rest of the roster provided a balanced second line that seemed capable of running a smart offensive play when Wright was covered.
This game plan of looking first for Wright and second for anyone else worked pretty well despite its predictable nature. Although Wright sometimes took close to 30 shots a game, she is talented enough to score relentlessly.
Those moments that Wright was out of the game or couldn’t find a shot, a handful of other players stepped up: Mohammed and fellow senior Britnee Millner, the two Hartigs — Jayna and Kelly, both sophomores — and three or four freshmen. Those players are the real reason this plan worked; it was a fundamentally balanced, team approach. Besides Wright, no fewer than six players were a threat to score 20 points in any given game.
Virginia, when taking advantage of its full talent, seemed like it could only lose when it got beat by sending opponents to the foul line. In the only two losses before Littles returned from academic ineligibility halfway through December, the team got scorched from the line. Old Dominion and Gonzaga, the opponents in the losses, took 70 combined free throw attempts, nailing 52 of them.
Besides that occasional flaw, Virginia outplayed its opponents in just about every game. When Littles returned in the game against Monmouth, the thinking at the time was that things could only get better. Littles, a more seasoned player than most of the others on the team who had been supplementing Wright, made a lot of shots, played a lot of defense and seemed to bolster the team.
And for a while, the Cavs seemed unbeatable. Besides a scare against Georgia Jan. 2, Virginia dominated every game until the beginning of conference play. Then, the troubles became obvious.
With Littles on the team, Virginia’s balanced approach began to shift to a more simple, two-pronged Wright-Littles attack, with Mohammed grabbing rebounds and laying in second-chance shots. The three routinely combined for at least three quarters of the team’s points.
The default plan for every play went something like this: Littles would take it up the court and look for a shot. If she found one, she’d take it. Otherwise, she’d pass it to Wright. The offense became two-dimensional and more predictable than when Wright was the lone star on the team with a multitude of players playing second fiddle.
Take the time to scroll through this season’s box scores and you’ll see Littles and Wright missing shot after shot as defenses clamped down on the Cavaliers. Part of this was just Virginia’s schedule becoming more difficult against the loaded ACC. But there’s no reason the team should have finished sixth in the ACC. Just from a coaching and talent standpoint, Virginia is at worst fourth in the conference, and even if that’s the case, the team should have given the likes of UNC, Maryland and Duke runs for their money.
And so I partially blame the dynamic of Wright and Littles for the team’s demise down the stretch. Once an opponent had the duo figured out, it had the team figured out. This pattern repeated regularly throughout February and March.
I don’t want to put, however, all the blame there. Doing so, for one, comes across as a criticism of the two players, when really they played their hearts out every minute they were on the court, which would often bear close to a full 40 minutes for each. The two are both, rightfully, All-America and All-ACC candidates, and Wright is a national player of the year nominee.
What’s more, this dynamic was not the only factor in Virginia’s demise; the main problem was that Virginia just peaked too early. When a team tops a national champion, it’s easy to do a simple translation into declaring that team a title contender, as yours truly did. Virginia worked so hard all season to keep those Final Four and ACC Championship hopes alive that the natural loss of momentum this past month really stung fans. It’s easy to call the Cavaliers’ play poor or their season a disappointment.
Maybe instead, though, the season should be looked at from the perspective of a team overachieving all year and then reverting to just achieving. After giving fans as thrilling a season as it could have hoped for, the team just ran out of energy.
The 2008-09 season closed with a decrescendo, a year after the 2007-2008 season closed with a crescendo. With the nation’s third-ranked recruiting class set to join the squad, and Wright preparing for her final season at U.Va., perhaps 2009-10 will be the full symphony we’ve been waiting for.
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