Virginia's Dave Leitao: Master Builder

Yesterday’s column, as awful as it was, alluded to Virginia’s identity crisis. More reflection gave way to a new thought about Dave Leitao and his Cavalier crew. In many ways, Leitao’s current collection of players has good reason for struggling with the team composition and identity.

Leitao can be an intense, even scary, coach. His personality contrasts starkly with Virginia’s previous coach, Pete Gillen.

Gillen is a quick-witted, entertaining banterer. He gives a loquacious, funny interview. On the court, his teams played like an upbeat, improvisational jazz quintet. Gillen imposed very little structure on their offensive and defensive sets, allowing his players the freedom to dribble, penetrate or rotate on defense when the player felt the time was right. When it worked, it was an exciting brand of basketball. When it didn’t, leads were next to impossible to keep and losses could be ugly.

Leitao (and his teams) lack that geniality and improvisation. From all accounts, Leitao is a taciturn, ornery individual, who never seems satisfied with his team’s effort. That’s why it’s so odd when he appears in advertisements. He never exhibits such delight on the court, why does he do so when enjoying a Pepsi?

In this way, he reminds me a lot of former Virginia football coach George Welsh, whom Jerry Ratcliffe, the local sports columnist for the Daily Progress in Charlottesville, once described as looking as though his shoes were perpetually tied too tight.

These attributes are why I admire him so much as coach. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I played for a similar type of coach in high school. Basketball coaches should be exacting and precise. They ought to expect perfection from their team.  It makes the team capable of playing beyond expectations. In this sense, watching a Dave Leitao team play is more akin to a symphony, with each part working in concert (pun intended).

Leitao has finally been able to bring in “his” type of players following Gillen’s contract buyout, albeit with a gap in-between talented classes. The contrast in coaching styles exacerbated the gap by directly or indirectly running off some gifted individuals. Derrick Byars, Dontae Minter, TJ Bannister, and Gary Forbes have all done reasonably well at their respective schools.

This is the first year that Leitao's troops are taking the bulk of the team's minutes, with the seniors on the team representing the last of the Gillen era. While they have certainly bought into Leitao’s system at this point, they were not necessarily part of Leitao's long term plan as coach. No one would argue that Sean Singletary is a Leitao disciple and not a Gillen disciple, but he was not recruited by Leitao and his staff. Adrian Joseph is not the type of wing player Leitao would probably prefer (but Leitao and Joseph have done a fine job together).  After this year, however, the program will be entirely a function of Leitao’s vision, which will eliminate any of the identity problems that the team is currently facing.