Defense has surprising Cavaliers at No. 2 in the nation

In November, Virginia men’s basketball entered the 2017-18 season unranked. Imagine that.

All the team has done since is win, early and often.

Virginia (22-1, 11-0 ACC) remained No. 2 in the AP Poll and the USA Today Coaches Poll this week, behind only Villanova. The Cavaliers won their 14th straight game Saturday at Syracuse, 59-44, holding the Orange to its lowest-scoring effort in Carrier Dome history.

The Cavaliers don’t have the longest active winning streak in college basketball — Purdue owns those bragging rights, with 19 in a row. But with just seven regular season games remaining, it appears to have been enough to take a team from preseason afterthought to probable No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed.

If Villanova should stumble in the coming weeks, Virginia also might be in line for its first No. 1 poll ranking since the 1982-83 season.

After a game in January, Virginia coach Tony Bennett said that though he felt a team having a high ranking “isn’t that significant,” it was important to recognize that his players climbed the rankings from the bottom.

“They’ve earned it. They fought their way and they won it,” Bennett said.

Bennett-coached teams are pretty familiar with high rankings. In the Cavaliers’ 2014-15 season, they started 19-0 and wavered between the second and third spots for more than two months. The difference between that team and this team was that Virginia was ranked No. 9 in the preseason three years ago.

But the Cavaliers have not strayed from what they do best. Once again, they can stake a claim as the best defensive team in the country. Entering Monday, Virginia leads the nation in scoring defense (52.3 points per game) and is top-five nationally in field goal percentage allowed and 3-point FG defense.

The Cavs are also a disciplined team that commits the country’s fewest turnovers (9.2) and second-fewest fouls (13.7) per game.

Virginia’s only loss came Dec. 5 on the road at West Virginia, 68-61, and the Mountaineers have been a formidable, top-25 team for most of the season. Since that loss, Virginia has collected some signature wins against ACC opponents. The Cavaliers shut down another top-25 foe, Clemson, 61-36 in late January. But it was their next game, a 65-63 win over then-No. 4 Duke, that was likely responsible for their uptick in AP Poll first-place votes two days later.

Virginia remained No. 2 after beating Duke, but jumped from one first-place vote in the media poll to 17 such votes. (The team received 16 first-place votes this week.)

A busy week lies ahead for the Cavaliers. They travel to Florida State for a game Wednesday, and when they return to Charlottesville, ESPN will broadcast its Saturday program “College GameDay” live from John Paul Jones Arena ahead of their game against rival Virginia Tech.

Florida State has a high-scoring offense and also reels in about 40 rebounds per game, including 12.78 per game off the offensive glass. Rebounding is one of the few categories the Cavaliers are statistically average in.

Bennett described the Seminoles as “mobile” and “active.”

“We’ve got some really good offensive rebounding teams in our league, but they pursue the ball and they go hard to the glass. They spread you out,” he said. “Their size, they’ve always been one of the taller teams in our league and in the country, and the way their aggressiveness on the glass gets them extra possessions and extra points.”

Florida State’s size also stands out in their guard play. The Seminoles’ two leading scorers, Terance Mann and Braian Angola, are 6-foot-6 guards, a shade taller than Virginia starters Kyle Guy, Devon Hall and Ty Jerome.

Guy, a sophomore, leads the Cavaliers with 15.5 points per game. After him with 12.1 per game is Hall, a redshirt senior whom Bennett has called an efficient scorer.

Hall was a light contributor off the bench for Virginia three years ago, the last time it was the No. 2 team in the country. This time around, he is one of the team’s seasoned leaders.

In the day and age of one-and-done freshmen, Bennett feels his upperclassmen who redshirted a year like Hall have brought only positive elements to the team.

“The maturity, first of all, physical and mental maturity. There’s just no substitute for experience,” Bennett said. “Also, I think (it’s) a situation where they have to learn patience in a way that they wouldn’t, and I think all those things together, what they’ve observed, the patience, the maturity, I think there’s a positive in that.

“They’re not past their prime at all,” he added. “They keep improving.”

So does Virginia’s ranking, to the surprise of some.