Virginia wasn’t on the radar coming into the season. They have a young team, but a star has emerged with Mike Scott. Scott is a 5th year senior big man who only played 10 games last year before injury. He was off to career year 15.9 ppg and 10.2 rpg before he got hurt. This year he is healthy and picking up where he left off. Scott is averaging over 9 rebounds and 16 ppg. He just won his 3rd ACC player of the week award and a big performance tonight will go a long way in his ACC Player of the Year resume.

 

Unfortunately for the Cavaliers, after Scott there isn’t much there. This team only has 3 seniors. Sene is a 7′ senior that plays the big man role. He is more of a space eater and defensive player. He gets fewer rebounds than a 7 footer should get and only averages 5 ppg. However, he is a shot blocker with 39 blocks thus far this season.

The other senior is Sammy Zeglinski. He is just your average player. He scores 10ppg as a 5th senior. He doesn’t take a lot of shot and he doesn’t get a lot of assist. He essentially is a role player. Thats all the senior leadership has to offer and now these 3 guys have to lead a young and overachieving UVA squad into Cameron where they have no beat Duke since 1995! That is 14 consecutive losses for Virginia at Duke.

I don’t see them snapping that streak this year. Virginia and Duke have 2 different offensive philosophy. Virginia wants to slow the game down as much as possible. They move the ball a lot on the perimeter. They were last in ACC last year in shot attempts, and one the same pace again this year. In this kind of offense, you have to make every shot count which UVA does a good job of as they do shot 46.5% on the season. However, Duke is even better than them in that category. Duke is the 8th best shooting team in the nation making 50% of its shots from the field.

That 50% shooting is what makes Duke the 8th highest scoring team in the nation. They score 82 ppg. That is their average. Virginia only scores 65.7 ppg, 228th in the country. Virginia has only scored 82+ points twice all season. Once was against Longwood and the other in Seattle and neither are legitimate basketball programs.

Virginia doesn’t have the offense to compete in this one. Their one player that can score, Mike Scott, but he is going to see double teams all night. Duke is deep with its bigs and will have enough bodies to throw at him from keeping Scott from taking over the game. This will be yet another Duke blow out

Take Duke -9.5