Mark Berman back here at Cassell Coliseum, where the Virginia Tech men's basketball team woke up in the second half and beat Liberty 58-46.
"I'm not going to spend very much time watching this tape because I don't think we're going to play another team that's going to play that way," coach Seth Greenberg said. "We weren't very good."
Tech trailed 23-21 after a first half that was played at Liberty's slow pace. Tech picked up the tempo in the second half, scoring the first eight points of the half and leading the rest of the way.
"We kind of played our game in the second half, made them react to us," Malcolm Delaney said. "The first half, we (were) kind of reacting to them."
"Their style of play slowed us down and we just got real lax," Deron Washington (17 points) said. "It seemed like we were out there just to be out there. They weren't really moving and we weren't really running the floor at all when we got the ball. ... The second half, we just came out with a lot more energy."
Liberty started four guards and played a deliberate pace on offense and used a zone defense to stay in the game.
Tech shot just 36.4 percent from the field in the first half, when it was 4-of-13 from 3-point range.
"We got the shots we wanted. We just were not able to knock them down," AD Vassallo (13 points, 3-of-12 from the field) said. "We kind of relaxed too much on the offensive side."
"We were very tentative first half," Greenberg said. "We were just moving it around the perimeter. We never attacked."
With Liberty packing it inside, power forward Jeff Allen didn't even take a shot.
"We couldn't really get the ball inside," Delaney said.
Allen had all 10 of his points in the second half.
"We actually threw the ball to Jeff a couple times in the second half," Greenberg said.
Liberty's offensive style lulled the Hokies to sleep.
"That's a very hard game to play," Greenberg said. "You're chasing people around for 25 seconds. ... We're not a trapping, scrambling team. We were not as alert, obviously, as I would've liked. But we did enough things the second half to win."
"I don't think we got a good warmup at the beginning of the game, so I think that led to the slow start," Delaney said. "We've got to start warming up harder, getting better preparation before the game. We didn't go hard in warmups (tonight)."
Tech had nine turnovers in the first half. Tired of LU getting balls off deflected passes, Greenberg told his team at halftime that anyone who gave up the ball on a deflection in the second half would be pulled from the game. Tech had just two second-half turnovers.
Greenberg was plenty mad at halftime. But after awhile, Greenberg told the players to talk amongst themselves.
"(I hoped) someone would take some ownership and leadership, and they did," Greenberg said. "I challenged them a little bit. ... I told them before the game, certain times you've got to be self-motivated. I can't be Knute Rockne before Liberty. ... They've got to take some ownership and motivate themselves. Now, the style of the game and pace of the game took away from our ability to properly motivated ourselves and lulled us to sleep."
Greenberg had hoped to play 10 players double figures in minutes, but he had to scrap that plan because of Liberty's four-guard approach. Only six VT players played double figures in minutes, with Washington playing 40 minutes and Vassallo 38.
Tech shot just 39.1 percent from the field.
No comments yet