Thursday, January 31, 2008
Cavaliers need more heart
Aaron McFarling
Recent columns
COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- The reigning ACC coach of the year is stumped. You can see it in the way he stalks the sidelines, the way he cocks his head with his hands on his hips, the way he shouts another question to a player as he holds his palms to the sky.
You could hear it in his voice after Tuesday 85-75 loss at Maryland. He called his team "extremely disjointed," and it is. The Virginia men's basketball team is extremely disjointed right now. And if there's one thing Dave Leitao can't stand, it's disorder -- or even worse, utter aimlessness.
If Leitao had his way, I'm pretty sure the Cavaliers would be practicing as you read this. And it doesn't matter whether you're reading it at 8 a.m. or noon or 11 p.m. The Cavaliers clearly need work, and most of it is between the ears.
That's the way this Jim Calhoun disciple does things: he drills it into you as you donate sweat, forces you to pound on your teammates until you start thinking like he does.
And here are the two things Leitao thinks about:
1. Rebounding.
2. Defense.
That's pretty much it.
"And those are the two things that are failing us right now," said Leitao, who added that those two things are more a product of attitude than raw ability. "Just because you ask a guy to do something doesn't mean he's going to do it."
There are only so many hours Leitao can keep lashing his banged-up team in practice, only so many different ways he can try to get his message through. It's clear what he wants. He wants a dozen Sean Singletarys. Not so much the slashing and shooting and scooping and scoring Singletary brings -- heck, every team in the nation wants more of that -- but the desire. The toughness.
The heart.
Against a dozen Sean Singletarys, there's no way Maryland's James Gist collects a rebound while lying flat on his back, as he did in the first half Wednesday night. There's no way the Terrapins, who rank eighth in the ACC in field-goal percentage, shoot 52 percent from the field. There's no way they score on 11 straight possessions, as they did late in the second half as the Cavaliers tried to mount a comeback.
Leitao had a rough night tactically, too. He tried a zone defense in the first half -- a seemingly rational move for a team with a thin post game -- but the Cavaliers did not look comfortable in it at all. The Terps torched it for seven 3-pointers in the first half. A mere 10 minutes into the game, before most of the fans at the Comcast Center had found their seats, the Terps led by 13 and were on pace to score 120 points.
That's the way things go when you've lost six out of seven games and are playing on the road against a team that is starting to realize its potential. Every move you make seems to backfire. And Leitao knows that each tally in the league loss column (it's now five and counting) gives future opponents confidence, starting with Virginia Tech, which beat the Cavaliers in Charlottesville and will try to complete the sweep Saturday in Blacksburg.
The Cavaliers are staring up a mountain, and they shouldn't even bother trying to see the top. The view from the bottom of the ACC reveals only Florida States and Wake Forests and N.C. States and maybe a couple of others, beatable teams that the Cavaliers are talented enough to step over.
Leitao was the ACC coach of the year last season for good reason. But the next month will tell us a lot about his ability to reach a diverse -- and very different -- group of players. Can he get them to buy in and start mushing up the mountain? Or will they set up camp at the bottom and pass around the thermos of cocoa?
Leitao's stumped, but he's no quitter.
You can bet he'll be mushing all the way till March.
