Virginia enjoying unusually strong offense, faces Queens

Virginia basketball fans may be asking: “Who are these masked men?”One reason the Cavaliers are hard to identify is their 12 new players. Another is that Virginia, long a grind-it-out operation, is playing at an up-tempo pace.The Cavaliers (5-1) will provide another glimpse of their makeover on Friday afternoon when they host Queens (3-4) of the Atlantic Sun Conference in Charlottesville, Va.Under first-year coach Ryan Odom, Virginia is averaging 86.5 points per game. It’s a departure from the Cavaliers’ 15 seasons under Tony Bennett, who stepped down abruptly in the preseason last year.The most Virginia ever averaged in a season under Bennett, the winningest coach in program history, was 71.4 points per game. That came in the 2018-19 season when the Cavaliers won the NCAA Tournament.Virginia’s offense is paced by Thijs De Ridder (17.5 ppg), a 22-year-old freshman from Belgium, and Malik Thomas (14.3 ppg), a San Francisco transfer who was the top scorer last year in the West Coast Conference.The Cavaliers look to rebound from an 80-73 loss Sunday to Butler in the Greenbrier Tip-Off. In both games in the tournament, including an 83-78 win over Northwestern, Virginia started slowly.”In both games, we were a little tentative at times,” Odom said. “We gotta coach our guys through that and help them unleash who they are.”

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