The Virginia men’s basketball team matched its best-ever start to a season Saturday afternoon with a 61-60 win against ACC up-and-comer Wake Forest, at John Paul Jones Arena.
The No. 2 Cavaliers (23-1, 11-1 ACC) rallied from seven points down with a 16-4 surge to begin the second half and eked out the victory when Demon Deacons junior guard Codi Miller-McIntyre turned the ball over on the game’s final possession.
Wake Forest coach Danny Manning called timeout with 12 seconds to play and his team down by a point after Miller-McIntyre — the Demon Deacons’ leading scorer — grabbed an offensive rebound off his own missed free throw. Back on court, Wake Forest (12-14, 4-9 ACC) isolated Miller-McIntyre at the top of the key.
The slashing guard drove at his defender — Virginia junior guard Malcolm Brogdon — but Brogdon stood strong, and Miller-McIntyre lost the ball. Brogdon scooped it up with two second left, and Virginia walked off the court with its second narrow win since losing junior guard Justin Anderson to a fractured finger.
“[Miller-McIntyre] is really hard to keep out of the lane,” Virginia coach Tony Bennett said. “We did a decent job on the first initial action and figured, alright, spread the floor—he’s going to attack. And we were just fortunate to make one stop at the end to come away with a tough win against a team that’s really improving.”
Miller-McIntyre tallied 13 points, eight rebounds and four assists in 32 minutes on the court. But the player Virginia truly struggled to contain was freshman forward Dinos Mitoglou, who burned the Cavalier defense on multiple pick-and-pops and finished with 18 points. The 6-foot-10 Greece native launched 12 3-pointers and made six to improve to 43-107 from distance this season.
Mitoglou’s partner-in-crime for the afternoon, freshman forward Cornelius Hudson, finished 3-5 from long range, while freshman guard Mitchell Wilbekin — former star Florida guard Scottie Wilbekin’s younger brother — added a 3-pointer of his own.
Virginia did manage to frustrate junior forward Devin Thomas, who came in averaging nearly a double-double. Post-trapped almost every time he touched the ball, the bruising left-hander registered three points, five rebounds, four turnovers and four personal fouls in 16 minutes of play.
“You see the pressure they put on you—they did that without Devin Thomas,” Bennett said. “[Mitoglou] poses some problems. You know, he’s the stretch-four, a European four…If you’re not there on the catch and he gets his rhythm going, you’re in trouble.”
Virginia — the nation’s top-ranked scoring defense — struggled at both ends of the floor in the first half, shooting 36.4 percent from the field and ceding 31 points. Brogdon provided the highlight play when he stripped Hudson near the 3-point line, put the ball behind his back and dribbled hard to the opposite rim, where he elevated for a tough left-handed layup.
Hudson fouled Brogdon in the air, and Virginia’s leading scorer nailed the free throw for a three-point play. At that point, Virginia trailed 10-9 with 12:03 to go in the first half.
Despite Brogdon’s impressive play, the Cavaliers never gained much traction in the opening period. And their fortunes seemed to go decidedly south when junior forward Evan Nolte — Anderson’s replacement in the starting lineup — crumpled to the court about two minutes before halftime.
In a cruel twist, Nolte walked off the court clutching the middle finger on his left hand. But he came out for the second half with the finger taped and proceeded to knock down Virginia’s only two 3-pointers. The Cavaliers are now 4-23 from deep without Anderson — the ACC’s most accurate 3-point shooter — in the lineup.
“I think we took a lot of good shots and took them with confidence and shot them with rhythm, but, you know, those two happened to go in and we just got to keep shooting them and not think about it so much,” Nolte said.
Virginia came out of halftime playing much better basketball. The Cavaliers trapped Thomas in the post on the first possession of the half, inducing an errant kick-out from the big man. At the other end of the floor, Nolte came around a screen and drained a 3-pointer from the top of the key, rousing the home crowd.
Brogdon put Virginia out in front with a left-handed layup just more than three minutes later, before Nolte, positioned on the left wing, pulled in a low pass from sophomore point guard London Perrantes and banged home his second long-range jump shot for a 38-34 lead.
The Demon Deacons refused to go away even after Virginia extended its lead to 13 points with 10:42 to play. Thomas brought Wake Forest within five with two free throws at the 5:34 mark, and Hudson cut the Virginia lead to three with a 3-pointer with 3:09 remaining.
Junior forward Anthony Gill — who led Virginia with 19 points — secured an offensive rebound after Brogdon misfired with just more than a minute left, but instead of letting the shot clock run down into the 30s, Nolte took a wide-open corner 3, drawing iron. Thomas pulled down the rebound with 49 seconds left, and moments later, Mitoglou made his sixth and final 3-pointer.
Down two, Wake Forest fouled Gill with 28 seconds to play. He split a pair of free throws, opening the door for a Demon Deacon game-tying basket. But Miller-McIntyre missed the second of two free throws after driving baseline, and Brogdon stopped him on the game’s final possession.
“It’s nothing new with Malcolm,” Perrantes said. “He does that in practice. He’s so big and so strong, and it’s really hard to get by him. When he wants to, he can play defense on the best of them.”
Virginia will play Pittsburgh (17-9, 6-6 ACC) at home on Monday night. Tip-off is slated for 7 p.m.
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