The threes kept falling. From the corner and the wing and the top of the key, from players whose games are built around shooting threes and from players who had never before made a three.
Junior guard Sam Lewis opened the game with one. Senior center Ugonna Onyenso ended the first half with one. Then he turned to the bench and held up three fingers as the buzzer turned the backboard red.
But Virginia, despite making half of its attempts Tuesday, ended up not even taking that many threes. It hardly needed to. So many other things were going so well in a 91-53 late-night throttling Tuesday of Hampton at a sleepy John Paul Jones Arena.
“It’s starting to flow,” Lewis said. “Just being out there with the guys, more and more each game, starting to click, getting a feel for each other.”
The Cavaliers (3-0, 0-0 ACC) led 47-19 at halftime and never considered slowing down. They ended up outrebounding the Pirates (1-2, 0-0 CAA) 49-25, limiting them to 31.7 percent shooting and 23.1 percent from behind the arc. Only senior guard Michael Eley, the game’s second-leading scorer with 16 points, scored more than six points for the Pirates.
Hampton Coach Ivan Thomas, an associate head coach two years ago at Georgetown, extrapolated postgame.
“I’m telling you, that’s a good team,” Thomas said. “I’ve been around in the Big East. I’ve seen some good teams. That’s a good team.”
Virginia took more than 30 threes in each of its first two games, making good on the promise of an offseason portal haul geared unabashedly toward prodigious three-point shooting. It made plenty. This time, as it found its way inside and commanded the boards, it went 11-22.
Lewis drilled three of them, scoring 13 points, and freshman guard Chance Mallory and senior guard Jacari White each made two, on their way to 16 and 10 points. But the real spark came from Onyenso, a maker of zero threes in his first three seasons of college basketball because he was a taker of zero threes in his first three seasons of college basketball.
He attempted a three in each of the first two games. This time, midway through the first half of his 57th college basketball game, he connected.
“Seeing the first one go in, I was like, man,” Onyenso said. “I was so happy to see the first one go in, because I’ve waited so long for this.”
He had been working all summer, he said, on his jump shot. His coaches gave him the confidence to take and make deep shots. The only thing left was to actually hit a couple.
That is not all he did. Onyenso scored 18 points and had 10 rebounds. He masqueraded as a human magnet around the rim, slamming down putback dunks and finishing lobs. He hit those two triples from the top of the key.
Hampton managed, inexplicably to Thomas, to hold Virginia freshman forward Thijs De Ridder to five points and three rebounds on 2-7 shooting. De Ridder had scored more than 20 points in each of his first two games. But Onyenso was there anyway.
“I don’t think that's anything that we did purposefully, to be totally honest,” Thomas said. “We held him down, but they had somebody else to step up.”
Odom directed most of his praise toward his team’s defense. Defense first, Lewis said, is the identity the team is searching for, and that seemed to be the result Tuesday. Hampton reached halftime with only 19 points.
“The defensive intensity throughout that first half was more like we want it to be,” Odom said. “Felt like the guys were urgent throughout, and just did a really good job of forcing hard shots.”
The biggest battle came down low, with both teams boasting solid physicality. Hampton’s Eunquie Rink is 6-foot-10, 220 pounds, and he challenged Virginia down low. But the Cavaliers surmounted that physicality with relative ease, outmuscling the Pirates on the glass.
“It was a physical battle early in the game,"Odom said, "and I thought our guys did a nice job of meeting that physicality.”
The game was so lopsided Odom spent the first 47 seconds of the second half sitting on the bench. Habit quickly tugged him to his feet. But with one more lighter game, a home game Saturday at 12 p.m. against Marshall, before a tougher stretch, Odom has to take the rest he can get.
Onyenso had a signature sequence in the first half. He drilled a three, blocked a shot, and slammed home a dunk, on three consecutive possessions.
He missed a three from the same spot the next offensive possession. There is still room to grow, if you want to be nitpicky. But the pieces, for Virginia, are coming together nicely.
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