Is Virginia basketball returning almost its entire roster a good thing?

June 1971, British rock band WHO Released a hit single called “The Lawless World”. In the turbulent 1960s, lead singer Roger Daltrey lamented the failure of the revolution and crouched to the ending of Pete Townshend’s guitar. “Meet the new boss, just like the old boss.”

I don’t know if Tony Bennett is a fan of punk rock (and Google’s “Tony Bennett’s Music” wouldn’t be exactly useful).But if so, he can rent a line from Dartley when introducing this Virginia Cavalier Team up with fans at John Paul Jones Arena during the blue-white scrimmage next fall: Meet the new team, just like the old team.

According to BartTorvik, Virginia returns 87.8% of the minutes from last season. This is the fifth most common NCAA and the largest of the major teams. The sum includes Kihei Clark, Reese Beekman, Armarn Franklin, Jayden Gardner, Kadin Shedrick’s five starting pitchers, and spare tycoon Francisco Kafaro and young-winged Thein Murray. Overall, Hus returns seven of the eight largest Minute Getters, with the only exception being the Cody Statman, who recently signed with the NBL Brisbane Bullets.

For better or for worse, this year’s roster will be almost indistinguishable from last year while in court. One neat way to think about the size of that 87.8% number: 200 minutes for a player to fill out a regular college basketball game (5 players on the floor x 40 minutes per player). Assuming everyone on the team plays exactly the same fractions as last season (which is certainly a flawed assumption, but a good number of ballparks), 176 minutes of those minutes are already filled and the rest Is only 24 minutes (12.2%). For 4 freshmen and 1 experienced transferee.

Is there any good news about this wealth of experience with Virginia’s roster? That means the team will be pretty good next season. With Virginia ranked 67th at the beginning of last season and acting as a canary in the mine for the upcoming unfortunate season, Hus is the 17th best team at this year’s NCAA in Bad Torbic’s pre-season prediction system. It is ranked as.

The Tony Bennett team benefits from some degree of continuity. The pack line is a hard-to-find scheme and was the first season of the system for three of the eight returners last year (Gardner, Franklin and Murray). They will make further progress this year at the end of the floor. A solid mover blocker attack also takes some time to get used to playing. Specifically, Indiana transfer Armarn Franklin appeared to be curling up from the pin-down screen in the last few contests of last season.

The numbers are also consistent with Tony’s squad’s vision test, which takes a long time to gel. In the last 10 seasons, Virginia has been ranked in the top 75 of Ken Pom’s roster continuity indicators only twice. 2015-16 is Bennett’s second best team in Virginia and 2018-19 is Bennett’s best team in his tenure.

Writing this 2022-23 roster with a pencil next to these two teams would be crazy, but the history of roster continuity leading to Virginia basketball is undeniable. At the very least, the team should be able to avoid early-season stumbling blocks such as this year’s defeat to the Navy and James Madison, ideally not sweating on Selection Sunday.

One of the benefits of Virginia returning basically all meaningful players from last season is to give a pretty solid idea of ​​what this year’s Hus will look like. There were many excellent players on the team last year. In another season under their belt, we are confident that this roster will outperform last season’s performance, compete in the ACC and win the NCAA Tournament Bath.

But by raising their floors, Virginia may be limiting their future caps.

Yes, this team is good. Are they good country titles? Except for miracles, it’s different. Do they like Sweet Sixteen?perhaps, If some things go wrong. There’s nothing inherently bad about building a team that can win right now — in fact, it’s in the coach’s job description. However, Virginia is now at risk of having a good team, at the expense of a great team later, by relying heavily on well-established people. Great teams are built primarily against the backdrop of this year’s new hire class.

‘Hoos’s 2022 class is arguably the best since the 2016 class, which won the national championship. The team brings in four potential differences, each with a high cap: Isaac McKneely, Isaac Traudt, Leon Bond, and Ryan Dunn.

Unfortunately for those guys, the competition will be fierce due to play time. Remember that this list is only about 24 minutes free. A significant portion of that will be transferred to graduates from Stretch Big Ben Van der Plus, who joined Hoos this offseason after spending four years in Ohio (winning one NCAA tournament). UVA). Red shirts may help a bit, but there’s no way to navigate the fact that Virginia’s proud recruitment class doesn’t have much of a chance to see the floor in a meaningful few minutes.

Tony Bennett’s hesitation in providing development minutes to young players has already cost a significant number of young players to Virginia. Minutes of play time per game in conference play. The jury hasn’t specifically mentioned Miličić yet, but none of these transfers have proven to be particularly expensive for Virginia.

But this year is not the case. Losing one of the four new hires to the portal in the next offseason is a nightmare scenario for Virginia, and the team has become so numerous established in places that freshmen may have occupied. By holding the player, we created an environment where it could happen.