After suffering through five losses this season against some of the nation’s most highly regarded defenses, the Gators thought they were prepared for anything an NCAA Tournament team could possibly throw at them.
In mid-November, they faced Ohio State featuring Big Ten steals leader Aaron Craft, who helped the Buckeyes pilfer Florida for 16 turnovers. Two weeks later, UF watched as Syracuse’s vaunted 2-3 zone defense forced 20 against the Gators.
In conference play, the challenge only grew in difficulty when facing Kentucky and Anthony Davis’ 7-foot-4 wingspan.
Each of those teams finished the regular season as a top-25 defensive unit, but none of them has been as stingy ahead of the NCAA Tournament as Virginia’s pack-line defense.
When the No. 7 seed Gators (23-10) tip off against the No. 10 seed Cavaliers (22-9) today in Omaha, Neb., at 2:10 p.m., they will be shooting on, statistically, the best defensive squad they have faced this year.
“There’s no question that is a real strength of their team — how well they defend, how they help each other, the pressure they apply on the ball,” Donovan said. “If you look at their team throughout the course of the year, they are certainly a very sound defensive team.”
Virginia’s scoring defense, which allows just 53.7 points per game, is ranked second in the country. This season, the Cavaliers have held 11 opponents to less than 50 points, the most by an Atlantic Coast Conference team dating back to the beginning of the shot-clock era.
However, Virginia isn’t dominating teams defensively with its talent alone. The Cavaliers’ pack-line defense — which was created at Wisconsin 20 years ago by UVA coach Tony Bennett’s father, Dick — attempts to compensate for a lack of athleticism by clogging the paint and placing its own players around an imaginary, 16-foot arc around the basket.
Virginia’s defenders won’t cross that line until the UF player they’re guarding receives a pass. If Brad Beal or Kenny Boynton attempt to drive the lane, the Cavaliers hanging back will try to collapse on him.
“It will be a little bit different for us, so to speak,” Donovan said. “We have played teams that don’t necessarily do exactly the same thing, but they are teams that have similar philosophies, similar mindsets in terms of how they play defensively.”
While UVA’s brand of defending welcomes teams like the guard-heavy Gators to settle for jump shots, the Cavaliers have done a good enough job closing out to limit their opponents to 29.5 percent shooting behind the 3-point line.
In their first NCAA Tournament game since 2007, though, the low-scoring Cavaliers will be short-handed following a Feb. 17 season-ending left foot injury to freshman sixth man Malcolm Brogdon.
Less than a month earlier, they also lost senior center Assane Sene to a right ankle injury, from which he has yet to return.
Stuck with a seven-man rotation, Virginia has scaled back the pace of its already-snail’s-pace offense to a near crawl. The Cavaliers went through the season scoring just 63.1 points per game — good for 10th in the ACC.
“Sometimes it can be difficult when a team is really disciplined with the ball and doesn’t turn it over,” UF senior Erving Walker said. “We want to hopefully probably press and keep pushing the pace and get the game going our way.”
Contact John Boothe at jboothe@alligator.org.
Florida and point guard Erving Walker (center) will be facing its toughest defense test of the season in Friday’s NCAA Tournament game against No. 10 Virginia, which limits opponents to just 53.7 points per game.
