Sometimes a team has good luck. Other times it has bad luck. And then there are times where you have good luck and bad luck at the same time. And that's pretty much how I feel about Virginia Tech men's basketball.
The Hokies have certainly benefited from some good fortune in close games this year. They are 3-0 in overtime games and 4-0 in games decided by six points or less. There's nothing wrong with good fortune (when was the last time Virginia Tech had a season where all the breaks went their way... in any sport?) — but history says close games tend to even out. And with a challenging ACC schedule ahead, that gives me a little pause.
On the flip side, the injuries are starting to pile up. Per the latest ACC injury report, Tyler Johnson is unavailable against UVA (2 p.m., ACC Network). Tobi Lawal has been out for seven games and his timetable is still unclear (I'm conditioned to always assume the worst when it comes to VT basketball injuries.) Antonio Dorn is nursing a back injury, not to mention Neoklis Avdalas and Jailen Bedford missing games due to illness.
Young has said before that he never wants strength of schedule to be a reason his team is left out of the tournament. He stuck true to his word this season, compiling a pretty solid OOC slate with five Quad I/II games. But Tech lost handily to their only Quad I opponent (Saint Mary's) and got blown out by the next-best team they played (VCU).
Summing up the non-con, Tech won pretty much all the games they needed to win. That's good. But apropos to the point about luck, they aren't grading super well in the metrics. Tech is 63rd in the NET and 68th on KenPom. The metrics love dominance, and the Hokies just haven't done that.
In their last 10 games, Tech has ranked 101st nationally in efficiency according to T-rank. That obviously won't be close to good enough to make the tournament. But that's heavily influenced by the fact that they've been a depleted team. It's unfortunate that this has happened to their most talented team in several years.
So step one: get healthy. Step two: erm... play better? The Hokies will need to, because the first two weeks of conference play will not be forgiving.
Where'd Jailen Go?
One unfortunate development has been the regression of Jailen Bedford. The fifth-year grad student has seen his minutes go down since the Battle 4 Atlantis and was a non-factor down the stretch against Elon. After a few bad turnovers and a couple lazy defensive possessions, Young had seen enough and benched him for the final 20 minutes of regulation and OT.
Bedford's advanced stats now put him among the least-efficient high-major wings. He has the worst defensive rating on the team. Overall, the Hokies are -27.6 points per 100 possessions worse with Bedford on the court than off. Possession ratings should always be taken with a grain of salt because there are lots of other dependent variables, but the gap is wide enough to merit concern: the next closest Hokie is Ben Hammond at -13.9.
Curiously, Bedford's drop-off almost perfectly coincides with the absence of Tobi Lawal. With Lawal playing, Bedford averaged 3.7 rim shots per game while shooting 50%. With Lawal out, just one rim attempt per game, and none in the last two contests. It's possible that Bedford just has a case of the yips, but it seems Lawal's absence has taken away driving opportunities.
The Greek... Meek?
By no means should we be doom and gloom about Avdalas, but his play so far has been rather whelming.
Even after he scored 30 points against Western Carolina, Young excoriated his lackluster defense in the postgame press conference saying he has to "guard better." He fouled himself out of the South Carolina game and mustered just six points against George Mason.
What do the overall stats suggest about Neo's performance? On the one hand, he's still passing the ball at an elite level. No player in the nation 6-foot-8 or taller has a higher assist rate than Avdalas (29%). You just don't see guys with that size distribute like that.
But his shooting numbers have merely been okay (53.0 eFG%), he hasn't rebounded a lot, and he's not getting to the line as much as he should with his athleticism (although he's been better the last couple games). Avdalas' PRPG — which is basically a giant soup of a player's stats that accounts for usage and pace — ranks him 33rd in the ACC. Good, but not quite the Superman we thought he'd be.
It's worth nothing that Avdalas still has the highest offensive rating when he's on the court, which should come as no surprise to anyone who's spent two minutes watching this team. His ability to pass alone makes him that valuable. But even with Amani Hansberry having a legitimate All-ACC caliber season (the analytics absolutely love him), Avdalas has to improve his contributions — especially with Tech's best two defenders and rebounders now out.
Conference Wars
The ACC is good again. It's not quite the ACC of old — like 2019, when they had three one-seeds and a national champion — but it's still good. Through non-conference play, the league held up to pretty much every major conference with the exception of the Big 12.
With non-conference games being well over 99% complete, here are the combined records of the power conferences against each other:Big12 = 45-30 (0.600)Big10 = 32-31 (0.508)ACC = 38-39 (0.494)SEC = 36-45 (0.444)Big East = 22-28 (0.440)— CougarStats (@CougarStats) December 30, 2025
As a testament to the depth of talent: this year, Hansberry ranks 16th in the ACC in PRPG (+4.2). If you put him in last year's ACC, he'd rank seventh.
This was my main concern coming into the year. Even though Tech had upgraded, so had most other ACC schools. North Carolina, Duke, and Virginia all returned back to dominant form; Louisville and NC State hired real head coaches; Miami got some fresh blood; and SMU has been a quality addition.
But maybe that's a good thing. The perception of the ACC has been so poor in recent years that there have been multiple teams win 13+ games in conference play and not receive an NCAA Tournament bid, which would've been unthinkable 10 years ago. Effectively, what that means for teams in the middle (like Virginia Tech) is that they have such a small margin for error that they have to be dominant in non-conference play — even though teams can improve during the season, dominating the league might not be good enough.
The selection committee has generally held to a clear standard for making the tournament: get a handful of quality wins, be good in the metrics, and avoid terrible losses. (In contrast to the College Football Playoff committee, whose guiding philosophy seems to be "how can we arrive at the correct answer under the least amount of transparency while also satiating the richest programs?") From that standpoint, Tech has done a good job of holding serve so far.
UVA and Wake Forest (Saturday) are both Quad I games. The Hokies will face Stanford and Cal at home after that (surprisingly both off to good starts, though probably inflated by easy schedules), before traveling to SMU for another Quad I roadie. Not that it would've mattered, but last year's team played four Quad I conference games the entire season. This year's team has as many in the first three weeks.
Tech may not win the meaningful games they need, but at least now they have meaningful games to win. As fate would have it, though, the Hokies will be at their weakest when they need to be at their strongest.
Written on the epitaph of Virginia Tech basketball: if it wasn't for bad luck, they'd have no luck at all.
Comments
At full strength, this is a potentially dominant team. Without Lawal and others, they appear to be less than the sum of their parts. Hoping he can get back healthy soon, would love to play loluva out of the building.
Here's an observation about Mike Young and Hokie basketball...
I love Mike Young. I think he has a real gift at getting the most out of a cohesive team, taking the long road with development and making sure the parts fit and work together like a machine. This is something VT, and college basketball, needed a decade ago.
Mike Young, at least as I see it on the surface, isn't particularly gifted at developing individual players, or at least allowing them to grow into what they should become. And that isn't to say he isn't a good coach to his individual players. I'm simply saying that Mike Young's gift has always been the development of his team. And guess what? He rarely has a cohesive unit year over year. So his muscle of "team development" can't really be flexed.
When I read the paragraphs about Avdalas, I'm not terribly surprised that his game has either leveled out or "regressed" to a certain degree. This is what we've seen happen many times with Mike Young. We get a talented player in, he get's into the system, and for one reason or another that player seems to not quite develop in the way most of us expected. The player transfers and subsequently finds some success along the way. Could that player have been successful had he stayed? Possibly. But Mike Young can't seem to keep guys around long enough for us, or him, to find out.
I had some relatively high expectations for the season. I still think it could be special as Mike Young's teams have a way of making sure we watch 2 or 3 different seasons all wrapped up into one (good... then we are bad... then we make a little run in March). Mike Young has a way of rallying the troops when it matters most., so there's hope! But I also won't be terribly disappointed if we simply aren't that good.
Man, those are some hard debbie-downer meds.
Not sure pointing at a freshman that has not played a full season of American basketball is a good example of failing to develop. Expectations on Avdalas were high because of how he played in Europe but let's be clear on a few things there.
Avdalas was in the top Greek League. That league is probably the 7th or 8th best league in Europe. I would put Euroleague, France LNB Pro A, Bundesliga ProA, Spains Liga ACB, Turkey's BSL, Russia's VTB, Italy's Serie A and even the Balkans ABA well above the Greek A1. Throw in Israel and the Netherlands Leagues as on par or better than the Greek A1 as well.
Now getting down to style of play between Europe and the NCAA. NCAA has a narrower paint area and teams clog it much more than you see in Euro basketball so Neo is having to adjust his approach to taking the ball to the rim much more than he had to overseas. In a large number of our games you have seen him start a drive only to hesitate when getting into a clogged paint. Thats not something that will correct itself in a handful of games.
Another difference for Neo to adjust to is the basketball itself. Europe uses a Size 7 ball that tends to be over 30 inches in diameter and has 12 panels. The NCAA uses a Size 7 ball that is strictly regulated at 29.5" and only has 8 panels.
As for Neo's defense, this is likely the first time Neo is being asked to play consistent man-to-man. Most Euro teams use a variety of zone defenses and rarely play man-to-man defense. Another aspect of this that probably affects Neo offensively is that in Europe, defenders using hands/arms on a player is called a defensive foul much more frequently so its discouraged by coaches there and not something Neo would be used to dealing with trying to get to the rim. Neo is used to his first step speed getting him past a defender and the defender sagging off to avoid being called for a foul but that isn't how NCAA officiating calls games here.
Thats alot to adjust to in a short window so not surprising that Neo has had ups and downs.
My bigger concern with Young and Staff is with post players developing which was why the return of Chester Frazier was such an enormous plus. Give Frazier time and Gurdak will look more and more like Hansberry as opposed to how we saw the development of Wessler not happen in previous years. The forwards were only good under Young while Frazier was here or when Young got lucky in the portal to get a guy developed by someone else ( Mutts/Aluma). Look at Lawal before injury. He averaged 7 rpg last year and this season was at 10.3 rpg after just 6 months working with Frazier. He has positioned himself much better in the paint this season rather than just trying to rely on his athleticism and it has shown.
I think you meant circumference not diameter. a 29.5" diameter is 2.5' in diameter. I am pretty sure that wouldn't go through the basket. But it might be amusing to see them dribbling that.
Love to see the player who could palm THAT ball !!
*Jarrett Boykin has entered the chat*
Did you know that he wears size 3XL gloves?
Yeah, as much as I'd love to have an elite team, we ain't got one. I do believe that with all the pieces together at once and functioning well we can be good, though. I like the scrappy OT play, whether we should have been there or not, and I really like the players, so I'm hoping for a couple of upsets and otherwise just a tough out for anyone we play from here on. A team I can root for and be excited by, win or lose.
Looks like we had that team I wished for tonight, and shorthanded too. OT again. And again. And yet again and a ten point win over the friggin' boohoos made for a hell of a good time here. I'll sleep well and wake up happy.
Hahaha down go the Hoos 🦃🏀
VT certainly took care of business today!