Cal Women's Basketball Falls to Rugged Virginia Tech Defense

Tournament hopes slip in disjointed loss to Hokies

Sometimes, it just isn’t your night.

Was it a lack of energy? A random off-night? A bad match-up? A gameplan that didn’t pan out? Some bad luck and bad whistles*? Whatever the precise reason, the Bears were flat against a good Virginia Tech team, and the result was a painful loss that pushes Cal further onto the wrong side of the NCAA tournament bubble.

In her post-game press conference, Charmin Smith called out Cal’s energy. Of course, her job is to identify things that are under Cal’s control that could have been better. And while I wouldn’t disagree that Cal was flat, I think what Virginia Tech does defensively had a lot to do with Cal’s struggles.

Tech’s defense is really good - the 4th best in ACC play, and top 25 level nationally. And one thing they particularly excel at is preventing teams from attempting 3s. This year they’ve only allowed opponents to put up 3s on 25% of their possessions, 7th best in the country.

Cal, meanwhile, likes to take 3s - they do so on 38% of their own possessions. One factor that was going to decide the game was if Cal could create and then make 3 point shots. Unfortunately for Cal, it was a factor that went decidedly in Virginia Tech’s favor. The Bears went 3-18 from deep, and two of those makes were in the final minutes when the game had already been decided.

It is perhaps to Cal’s credit that they knew their usual 3 point shots might not be available, and they seemed to enter with a gameplan to get the ball inside more frequently. Cal’s first three possessions featured entry passes to Sakima Walker. However, that first attempted post entry was thrown away for a turnover, which set a different kind of tone - Cal’s entry passes were frequently off target, and the end result was 22 turnovers that was probably the biggest difference between the two teams. To my eyes, the issue with Cal’s performance was less an energy issue, and more a sharpness issue - the Bears spent much of the game throwing passes that could never be caught, or fumbling the ball unexpectedly. Maybe we’re saying the same thing - that low energy manifests in these kinds of physical errors.

Either way, the pattern was set. Cal’s possessions featured only rare, fleeting glimpses of space on the perimeter, and inefficient attempts to get the ball towards the bucket. Cal shot a solid 15-31 on their two point shots, and most of those shots were reasonably near the basket. But they gave up so many possessions with turnovers on entry passes or balls poked away when driving to the basket. The end result was Cal’s 3rd least efficient offensive night of the entire season.

Despite all of Virginia Tech’s great defense and Cal’s ineffective offense, the game stayed in doubt until late. Virginia Tech is a pretty bad shooting team, and Cal did a good job forcing mediocre shots and keeping Tech off the glass. It was an ugly, grinder of a game for 30 minutes, with no team building a lead bigger than 7 points, and most of the first 30 minutes neither team had a lead of more than a possession.

It felt like a game where if either team ever managed to go on a small run, it would ice the game early because the other team wouldn’t have enough offense to respond. Unfortunately, it was Tech who got that run, outscoring Cal 15-2 after the Bears took a 1 point lead to start the 4th quarter. It functionally ended the game as a competitive contest.

*I really wanted to dedicate an extended portion of this recap to complaining about a few specifically awful calls, particularly a truly horrendous illegal screen that gave Sakima Walker her 3rd foul early in the 3rd quarter. But I can’t credibly make a case that the whistles were the difference in this game, so I have to keep the Sour Grapes section mercifully brief.

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This probably ends Cal’s slim tournament hopes. For Cal to make the NCAA tournament, they would likely need to win their last four regular season games, then win their first game in the ACC tournament (probably in the 7 or 8 seed, against a 9 or 10 seed like Clemson or Stanford) THEN win a neutral site game against a team like Louisville or Duke in the quarterfinals.

Cal’s efficiency profile suggests that they’re about as good as an 11 seed at-large tournament team, but making the tournament isn’t about your efficiency profile, it’s about who you’ve beaten. Unfortunately, Cal is 0-8 against Quad 1 opponents and 3-3 against Quad 2 opponents, and that’s just not good enough to make the tournament. A 1 point loss to Missouri, a 4 point loss to USC, a 4 point loss to Duke, a 3 point/3OT loss to Syracuse - swing one of those games and Cal is probably right on the edge of a tournament spot. Swing two and the Bears are probably an 8/9 seed and we’re thinking more about seeding.

This is simultaneously encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging to be so close to an unexpected reward in what I thought would be a deeper rebuilding year. Frustrating because when a team is this close, it’s easy to identify tiny changes that result in a very different outcome.

Cal heads out for their final road trip of the regular season, where they will be solid favorites to beat Florida State on Thursday, and slight favorites to edge Miami on Sunday.