Dear Old U.Va.

An Unexpected Area of Improvement

Monday, December 28 2009 by Ben

Tony Bennett's arrival reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.  Aptly titled, an elderly, winged man shows up in a village and miracles begin to occur, just not the ones you'd expect.  For example, a bald man seeks out the avian geriatric and after being touched by him, grows teeth, not hair.

Thus, when the great defensive mind of Bennett showed up in C'ville, I did not expect an offensive renaissance.  Don't be fooled by the slow pace and the low points per game output. Virginia is scoring at an excellent clip: 112 points per 100 possessions (ppp).  For comparison's sake, last year's squad only scored at 102 ppp.  Virginia hasn't scored this well since Sean Singletary left town.

A rather feeble December slate has buoyed this stat - including a ridiculous 135 ppp versus Hampton.  However, Virginia has managed decent offensive outputs versus just about all of their opponents, save for South Florida, a stout defensive team.

Where is this offensive output coming from?

Surprisingly, it's not because Sylven Landesberg morphed into unstoppable force.  Landesberg is a very good scorer, but this year's output actually isn't that much different than last year's.  His ORtg is a tick higher (105 versus 102) as is his usage (25% versus 29% of possessions), but really his game hasn't changed that much: he draws fouls at a tremendous rate and doesn't shoot the three all that well (33% on the year).

Ditto for Mike Scott, who's seen more possessions this year than last, but his game hasn't changed enough to warrant the dramatic upswing in efficiency.

No, I attribute the difference to Sammy Zeglinski and Jeff Jones.

Zeglinski has but one weapon in his arsenal: the three point shot.  Sammy has been stroking it at 48% from three and has a unreal 62% true shooting percentage (TS%).  On the offensive end, he has all but made up for the loss of last year's best three point shooter, Jamil Tucker.  The worry for Zeglinski, however, is that his hot shooting (20-41) is a small enough sample to raise eyebrows as a statistical anomaly, especially when you consider his abhorrent shooting last year (31%).

Jones, on the other hand, looks like the confident scorer that came out of Maryland.  Though he shoots a bit much for my taste, it's hard to argue with the results thus far.  He's shooting 48% from two and 43% from three, a vast improvement over the 40%/29% he put up last year.  Jones is big, strong kid and can score in the low post against smaler defenders.

If both can keep this up combined with defensive improvement (notably eh so far) and some luck, Virginia may be able to make some noise in the ACC.