Motivated by pride, Louisville answers the bell at Virginia Tech
Danielle LernerBLACKSBURG, Va. — In a hallway within view of the basketball court where No. 17 Louisville knocked off No. 10 Virginia Tech, Cardinals guard Christen Cunningham was bombarded with questions seeking an explanation for how Louisville had been revived two days after faltering at home against North Carolina.
Cunningham's explanation was simple.
“Pride," he said. "I think we just didn’t want to go out sad twice."
As much as Louisville's 72-64 win at Virginia Tech on Monday was a case study in attention to detail and game preparation, it was also an emotional response, a way of answering a bell that went unanswered last time out at the KFC Yum Center.
This Louisville team has chosen to nurture pride over disappointment and bitterness, the still-unfinished result being a handful of grad transfers and leftovers from another coach's regime melded together into a cohesive unit capable of shocking the college basketball universe week in and week out.
Louisville (17-6, 8-2 ACC) hasn't dropped back-to-back games since losing to Tennessee and Marquette in November at the NIT Season Tip-Off in Brooklyn. It was then that coach Chris Mack first declared he believed the Cards to be an NCAA Tournament team, though it would be a while before they looked the part.
Since then, something has shifted.
“I think our team’s gained a little bit of belief in themselves," Mack said Monday. "I’ve told our team from the very beginning I felt like we were a tournament team, but how I feel and what we do are two different things. I think even though we lost those two games at Barclays, it told us something about ourselves: If we just take care of the ball a little bit better, rebound a little bit better, know what we’re doing defensively a little bit better, take a little bit more pride in that area, that we can compete with anybody.
"We felt we didn’t play at our best against Carolina and I think some guys in that locker room — every guy in that locker room — was convinced they weren’t going to feel that way tonight, at least with our effort.”
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Belief was not all it took, of course. There were the little subtleties to Louisville's game that weren't there two days ago: Dwayne Sutton diving to the floor one minute and defying gravity the next to grab offensive rebounds, Cunningham exploiting gaps in the lane to score at the rim, Malik Williams denying second-chance points, the Cards controlling tempo and finding open shots.
As guard Ryan McMahon put it, against North Carolina “we were full of crap in certain areas of the game. We made sure that we weren’t tonight.”
The Cards allowed 18 second-chance points vs. UNC and two vs. Virginia Tech. Instead of being out-rebounded by 17, they won 30-25. Their 3-point field goal percentage increased from 34.5 percent to 48.1.
"Coach Mack does a great job of showing us what we did wrong, and when we fix those things we go out there the next game and we start playing better," McMahon said. "Go figure. That’s what coaches do, they fix your mistakes. And when you have players who are bought in like us we’ll fix the mistakes when we’re actually playing.”
Following a Jan. 12 win at then-No. 12 North Carolina, Monday marked the second conference game in which Louisville bounced back from a loss with a statement victory, a pattern not exclusive to league play. The Cards responded to the two losses in New York by taking down No. 8 Michigan State at home in November. They rebounded from a defeat at Indiana with a resume-building win over Lipscomb, and from a loss to No. 15 Kentucky with a rout of Miami in the ACC opener last month.
Louisville is the only Division I program with two road wins against teams ranked in the Associated Press top 12 this season.
“I feel like if we have a bad game we can get out of it anytime," forward Jordan Nwora said. "We know the rest of the season we’ve got to play in a panic. At the end of the day, if we have that panic we’re going to be playing harder so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Just something that’ll help us in the long run.”
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Louisville looked anything but panicked while hitting 13 triples and leading Virginia Tech for 38:29, a dominance that slightly baffled Mack.
"For us to come in here and really from start to finish be in control of the game, I honestly don't know how we did it other than I thought we were a lot tougher today than we were against Carolina," he said.
With barely more than 48 hours to instill those lessons, a time frame squeezed by travel delays that caused the Cards to miss their gameday walk-through, Mack approached the Virginia Tech game as an opportunity rather than as a burden.
He said his thinking was, "As bad as we felt on Saturday afternoon, we can feel that much better on Monday night."
The Cardinals' performance in Blacksburg was a refusal to let the bitterness of losing swallow them whole, a manifestation of the attitude Mack said the players carried with them into Cassell Coliseum: "We’re not going out without a fight."
That's where belief comes into play, with pride riding on its coattails.
Perhaps that's why, midway through the second half Monday, Sutton turned his back to the hoop after handing the ball off to McMahon for a 3-point jumper. McMahon still had both feet off the ground when Sutton began jogging back on defense, glancing casually over his shoulder to watch the ball drop through the net seconds later.
Every shooter will tell you: Even if shots aren't falling, what carries you through is the belief that the next one will.
Danielle Lerner: 502-582-4042; dlerner@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @Danielle_Lerner. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/daniellel.