So Virginia Tech basketball coach Seth Greenberg probably woke up this morning thankful he’s not Billy Gillispie, whose Kentucky team lost last night to Virginia Military Institute. Greenberg’s Hokies managed to get by Gardner-Webb 65-62 in The Opener last night at Cassell Coliseum. Game No. 2, home Monday against Mount St. Mary’s, is fast approaching.

The good news for Greenberg is that The Mount doesn’t play a small lineup like Gardner-Webb did. That lineup gave the Hokies fits because when the Bulldogs went to a zone defense, Greenberg had to respond with a small lineup in his zone offense. But with sophomore small forward J.T. Thompson out (hernia), Greenberg had to shuffle his zone offense on Thursday, moving A.D. Vassallo and Terrell Bell to Thompson’s usual “four” spot and sliding Jeff Allen into the “five” position. (More on that below.)

The Mount plays two 6-7 senior forwards—Sam Atupem (from Newport News) and Markus Mitchell (from Virginia Beach). The Mount has seven players from the state of Virginia, including Atupem’s younger brother, Shawn (a 6-7 sophomore forward), and 6-7 freshman forward Jacolby Wells, from Emporia and Greensville County High. In an odd twist of numbers, The Mount (the actual nickname is the Mountaineers, but I like The Mount better) has seven players on their 15-man roster who are 6-7.

Mount coach Milan Brown, who is from Hampton, took over in 2003 for Jim Phelan, he of 830 career wins. Last season, Brown led The Mount back to its first NCAA tournament since 1999. It beat Coppin State in the play-in game, then got hammered by North Carolina, 113-74, in the first round. The Mount opened this season last night with an 84-76 win over Loyola.

Greenberg watched tape of The Mount all day Friday. He was relieved to see—though I’m sure it didn’t come as a surprise to him when he watched the tape—that The Mount starts two 6-7 players. “So we’re fine there,“ he said after The Opener. “They run their stuff really well. They run the flex, they run the stagger, they run the high ball screens. They push it really hard in transition. But they have a set secondary break, whereas this team [Gardner-Webb], guys can be in any position in transition. So getting matched up was difficult.“

Now some more postgame thoughts, broken down by their source ...

JEFF ALLEN

- Said he cramped because he didn’t drink enough water before the game or at halftime.

A.D. VASSALLO

- “It’s just a matter of knowing what we’ve got to do and being a little more focused at the end of the game.“ 

- “I was cramping up myself. Every time I jumped up to get a rebound, I felt my calves kind of getting a little hard. Both of them. Like coach said, we can’t be tired at this point. It’s something that we’ve got to get through. We’re gonna have a stretch where we play three games in four days. If you’re not ready for that, there’s a good chance you may lose three, or just two. It’s just something we’ve got to get down. Starting tomorrow in practice, we’ve got to get through that zone offense and try to execute a little better. Everybody’s gonna zone us a little more. It’s something we’ve got to do from tomorrow on. If we don’t get it down, this is a tough stretch. We’re trying to win as many games as we can.“

TERRELL BELL

- Gardner-Webb got three chances to tie the game at 65 with 3-pointers in the final 12 seconds. Grayson Flittner, the Bulldogs’ best player last night, missed the first one, but Aaron Linn grabbed the rebound and flung the ball to Flittner in the corner opposite Gardner-Webb’s bench. “I knew he was my man, so I had to get to him,“ Bell said. “I didn’t have a choice. I was at the top of the key, because the shot before, he had shot that jumper.“ Bell raced toward the corner and blocked the shot with his right hand. “I had most of my fingers on it,“ he said. Malcolm Delaney grabbed the loose ball for Tech.

- Bell said that as he blocked the shot, he thought about Deron Washington’s last-second block of a Greg Paulus 3 in 2007—which gave Tech a 69-67 win at Duke. But Bell’s block more closely resembled another block—a far more significant block, at least in terms of the game—that I had seen before. Gardner-Webb assistant coach Michael Lee certainly remembers this block well. It happened in the 2003 national championship game. Lee, playing for Kansas, shot a 3 from the corner in the final seconds, which would have tied the game, but Hakim Warrick soared in for the block, giving Syracuse its first ever national title.

- I remember watching that game on a giant projection screen in the Carrier Dome. I covered that Syracuse team for the school’s student paper, The Daily Orange, but I wasn’t in New Orleans for the Final Four because we were given only one credential for a writer. After the game ended, I reached into my backpack and started distributing the extra editions of our paper that we had printed ahead of time in case Syracuse won the title. (“CHAMPS!“ the headline sceamed.) Students streamed out of the Dome and down to Marshall Street, where they used the papers to light fires and swilled beer as snow fell from the April night sky (only in Syracuse, gang).

- Sorry for getting off on a tangent here, but here is a really cool story about Lee’s memories of that shot.

MALCOLM DELANEY

- “We learned a lot. We just learned a lot of stuff that we’ve got to focus on and do stuff to be a better team. We’ve just got to come together. As the season goes on, we’re gonna start to get way better. We’re not going to start out where we ended last year. This year, we’ve just got to play two halves. We only played one half today.“

- “Jeff was playing out of position in the second half. We couldn’t really get him the ball, because he didn’t know where to pick his spots at on the offense. He was playing the five. He was playing on the baseline of the zone. He really struggled with that.“

GREENBERG

- “I thought we did some good things in the first half, excluding, obviously, guarding Flittner. I thought the start of the second half, I thought we lost our defensive principles and focus.“

- “We went small. Unfortunately, we only practiced with that small lineup for one day. That killed our zone offense. When we go small, we expect to play J.T. at the four. Yesterday for the first time, I had to put Terrell and A.D. in there because for games like this, we have to go small. You’ve got to put someone there.“

- “Of course, defensively, you’ve got to be able to guard. If we played Lewis [Witcher] and Cheick [Diakite], we wouldn’t be able to guard all those 3-pointer shooters and all those ball screens. We got through it. In March, no one’s gonna sweat it if we get better. If we don’t get better, we’re gonna have a run of nights like this.

- On Allen’s cramps—“I kept on asking him to come out, but I didn’t know who to put in.“ 

- “Again, in the zone offense, I thought we were very inept. That’s my fault. I probably should have just done something very, very simple when we lost J.T. But in one day, it’s hard to put in a zone offense. Most of the people will play will have legitimate power forwards – or at least two forwards. [Gardner-Webb] had more perimeter players, and we had to be able to guard on the perimeter.“

- “I’m not pleased. I thought we had the game totally under control. I think I overreacted a little bit at the end of that run. I probably should have got our guys a little more relaxed and just called timeout. I wanted to see if they could work through it on their own.“ (The Bulldogs cut Tech’s lead from 18 to to eight from the 11:36 to 7:27 marks of the second half. They cut it from 10 to three from 5:34 to 1:56.)

- Tech kept Gardner-Webb in the game by turning the ball over on three consecutive possessions in the final 2:25. “Stupid turnovers,“ Greenberg said. “Careless turnovers.“ With Tech up 63-57, point guard Hank Thorns turned it over at 2:25, which led to an Anton Silver 3. On the next Tech possession, Thorns turned it over again, at 1:23. Fortunately for Tech, Flittner missed a layup. But Dorenzo Hudson gave the ball right back at the 46-second mark. The ensuing Gardner-Webb possession ended with two free throws by Aaron Linn, which cut the Hokies’ lead to 63-62. But there were just 24 seconds left, so Gardner-Webb had to foul Delaney, who made both of his shots.

- Tech’s Big Three (Allen, Vassallo, Delaney) had 19, 19 and 15 points. The next highest scorer was Diakite, with four. “I need see some other people step up,“ Greenberg said “Dorenzo Hudson has practiced so well. I feel so bad because he’s gonna have a great year. He’s practiced so well and he didn’t play well tonight (1-of-7 shooting, five turnovers). I joked with him. He doesn’t know who Austin Powers is probably. I told him he had his mojo back. And today he just struggled. I thought Terrell gave us some quality minutes. Lewis’ aunt passed away. He wasn’t with us yesterday, or he would have played a little bit more. He didn’t practice with us yesterday. He just came in for shootaround today.“

- On Allen moving to the “five” in Tech’s zone offense—“He’s never played that position in practice. We moved him to a position in our zone offense that he worked on one day for about 20 minutes. So it was unfair to him, but we had to guard them on the other end, especially when we thought they were gonna be shooting a lot of 3s, setting a lot of ball screens. So literally, Jeff and Terrell and A.D., when we had that lineup, they were all in positions that they had not played, except for 20 minutes yesterday.“

- “This time of the year, you see Miami of Ohio taking UCLA right to the wire, you see Kentucky losing to VMI – this time of the year, teams are not prepared yet. We’re still a very young team. We had four sophomores out there, I’m pretty sure, most of the second half.“

- “I was disappointed defensively because that’s who we are. That’s what we have to hang our hat. Defensively, we just lost our defensive focus.“ Gardner-Webb shot 40 percent in the second half, compared to 32.3 in the first.

- On the urgency of fixing the issues that surfaced last night—“We don’t have a lot of practice time. We’re gonna come in tomorrow at 11:30, then we’re gonna practice Sunday at 2. Then we leave at 4 o’clock in the morning to go Puerto Rico on Tuesday [for three games in the Puerto Rico Tip-Off tournament, next Thursday through Sunday]. In Puerto Rico, we’ll practice one day and play two games and do a walk-through and play another game and fly back on Monday because we’re not chartering back, which kind of kills us. So we’ve got four practices between now and after Elon [on Nov. 26]. It’s not exactly a lot of time.“

- “But if we play a normal-sized team and we don’t have to go small, then we can play the two big guys – Lewis and Cheick, or Victor [Davila] – and not have to move guys around. But in games like this when people go small, we’ve got to guard 6-3 guys on the floor, I’m not going to ask Jeff to guard that guy and I’m not gonna ask Lewis to guard that guy. So that’s the reason we had to do what we had to do.“

- On Davila, one of Tech’s two freshmen and the the only one who figures to play a role this season (Davila had no points and no rebounds in two minutes last night)—“It’s too early in the season. The guy has practiced three weeks. He’s going to be a good player. There’s no doubt about it, but he’s practiced three weeks. I put him in the first half, he’s got to rebound the ball. Cheick, Lewis and Victor in the first half, if you combine them, they got zero rebounds in 18 minutes.“

Posted by Darryl Slater in • College Sports • Virginia Tech
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