Dai Dai Ames started at point on Tuesday against NC State, played nine first-half minutes, subbed out at the 10:03 mark in the first half, and didn’t return – and this somehow wasn’t a topic for UVA Basketball coach Ron Sanchez in the postgame press conference.

AFP beat writer Scott German had to track down the answer on why Ames was glued to the bench for the final 30 minutes from media relations director Erich Bacher after the presser was over.

The answer from Bacher: it wasn’t an injury.

So, just a coach’s decision, then?

Seems to be what he was saying there.

If so, and it looks like this is what happened, it was a curious move, involving a guy averaging 25.6 minutes per game coming in, but then, I guess, it worked out, in the end.

With Ames on the bench, Virginia (8-5, 1-1 ACC), which trailed the Pack, 39-29, at halftime, had a big second half – 41 points on 13-of-23 shooting, 7-of-13 from three, 8-of-10 at the line, with just one turnover.

The big second half turned a double-digit halftime deficit into a 70-67 Virginia win.

We did get this, from Sanchez, by accident, on his in-game adjustment:

“We decided to share the ball by committee, and no longer kind of having just one dominant ball-handler. That allowed more guys to move and get open,” the coach said.

Point guard-by-committee

Ames being out of the rotation for the day meant more minutes, and more responsibility, for Andrew Rohde, who put up nice numbers – 11 points on 4-of-8 shooting, 2-of-3 from three, with seven assists and just one turnover in 36 minutes, including going all 20 in the second half.

“I thought Rohde was terrific today at the point guard spot,” Sanchez said. “Not only did he shoot the ball well and score, but he assisted well, he got guys shots, and when he plays like that, we’re a different team.”

Taine Murray started the second half in place of Ames, and in 13 minutes of floor time after halftime, the senior scored one bucket, on a drive into the lane, and had three assists, finishing the day with four points and five assists in 23 minutes.

Freshman Ishan Sharma also got more run with Ames on the bench, giving Sanchez six good minutes in the first half and a nice nine-minute stretch in the second half, finishing with six points, on a pair of threes, in 15 minutes.

Ames, meanwhile, in his nine first-half minutes, was 1-of-2 from the floor, scoring on a nice dribble-drive leading to a layup two minutes in, with no assists and no turnovers.

It wasn’t obvious that Ames did anything wrong, is what I’m getting at there.

And since nobody asked Sanchez in the presser about what would go into the books as a DNP-coach’s decision for Ames in the second half, we won’t know any more about that.

Keatts, missing a key guy, coached himself into a box

I saw Kyle Guy, one of the army of assistants on the UVA bench, chatting with Ames during a couple of the media timeouts in the second half, what I thought was Guy trying to talk Ames into keeping his head up, in case his number was called.

And I assumed it would be, because I assumed NC State coach Kevin Keatts would try to stem the second-half tide – Virginia made 13 of its first 17 from the floor in the first 15 minutes of the second half to turn a 14-point deficit into a 12-point lead – by doing what Memphis coach Penny Hardaway did a couple of weeks ago, by going with half-court and full-court pressure.

He finally did, once his team got down double-digits, but for those first 15 minutes, as the Cavaliers were getting buckets from Elijah Saunders (22 points, 14 in the second half) in the post and at the foul line, and inside-out looks for Rohde (2-of-2 from three in the second half) and Isaac McKneely (3-of-6 from three in the second half), Keatts let Virginia do what it does on offense.

“We just didn’t pressure the ball enough,” said Keatts, who told reporters after the game that he had prepped for Virginia with the idea of going with a two-bigs lineup, with Brandon Huntley-Hatfield and Ben Middlebrooks, to counter Virginia’s size in the post, a plan that fell through when Middlebrooks came down with an illness last night that led to him being a scratch at gametime.

“It’s weird, you know, when you lose a guy right before the game, you don’t, you know, it’s hard to adjust,” Keatts said. “If you got three or four days and, you know, he’s out, all of a sudden, you think about your starting center going into the game, he’s been practicing really well, and then all of a sudden, you get a phone call that he’s probably not gonna be able to go.

“First of all, I feel bad for Ben, because there’s not another guy who wants to play more than him. And then obviously it changes our team,” Keatts said. “I thought we did enough in the first half where it didn’t show up, but in the second half, as the game went along, you could tell we needed his body.”

As it was, Keatts coaxed 13 decent minutes out of little-used 6’9” JUCO transfer Ismael Diouf, who had two points and four rebounds, not bad for a guy who had given Keatts a total of 20 minutes coming into the game.

It’s not second-guessing from me, because I was doing it in real-time, to say, Keatts needed to do something to get Virginia out of its rhythm, which he did, eventually, going in the final five minutes with full-court pressure after made baskets and dead-ball changes of possession, and half-court traps once Virginia had the ball in the frontcourt.

And when he finally went there, it worked – Virginia didn’t make a shot from the field in the final 5:02, getting just three free throws in that span.

That’s what can happen when you make the game ugly against a Virginia team playing the entirety of the second half without its primary ball-handler.

Just waited too long to make that adjustment.

Sanchez makes good adjustments, on both ends

It was almost like this one was, which coach would blink first?

State sliced and diced Virginia on the offensive end in the first half, taking advantage of its four-guard lineup to make Sanchez’s decision to go with two bigs work against him.

Saunders, in particular, had trouble keeping up at the four spot checking Dontrez Styles and Dennis Parker, and even though those two only scored a total of three buckets in the first half, the help they required from the Virginia D allowed the Pack to get the ball to open shooters on the perimeter, and State, shooting 32.0 percent from three coming in, took advantage, connecting on 6-of-11 from long-range in the first 20.

“The numbers might not show it, but that’s a really good shooting team. You saw it today,” Sanchez said. “Their shots came based on our breakdowns defensively. We adjusted in the second half. We were there on the catch. We touched close instead of giving guys room and rhythm threes, which they got in the first half.”

This is why, per Sanchez, you saw State shoot 11-of-33 from the floor, and 2-of-12 from three, in the second half.

On the other sideline, Keatts thought the issue for his team was that “the ball stuck” on the offensive end in the second half.

“We’re playing well together, and you look out there, and some of your better guys may not be scoring the basketball, and so now it’s like, Hey, we’ve got a 12- to 14-point lead, let me go score. And that’s the wrong formula against this team, this program, in this building,” Keatts said.

“One of the things I’ve talked about is when you play Virginia, because they do a great job of gap protection, it’s got to be more ball movement and player movement. Didn’t get that. We only had three assists in the second half,” Keatts said.

The defensive adjustments from Sanchez got the ball stuck on the State offensive end.

On the Virginia end, it was the conscious effort to get the ball inside to Saunders, who at the four spot was being guarded by State guards giving up several inches and a lot in pounds and strength.

“I just felt like, a lot of times I had a mismatch on me,” said Saunders, who was 7-of-9 from the floor, 1-of-2 from three, and 7-of-8 at the line to get his 22 points.

The focus with Saunders was on “trying to get back cuts, trying to seal, post up, just being more aggressive towards the basket,” he said after the game.

“Just noticing the mismatches, and once it started to work, I feel like we just started hitting it more,” Saunders said, “and then I feel the more we got into the post, then iMac went on that spurt where he had all those threes, so I feel like that definitely loosened up the defense to give those guys open looks.”

Virginia ended up shooting 54.2 percent (26-of-48) from the floor, 9-of-20 (45.0 percent) from three, with seven turnovers – just one in the second half, and in that second half, those 41 points came on just 27 possessions.

Might this be a formula that we see for this team going forward?

Remember, Sanchez went with Rohde as his starter at the point in the season opener, with Ames getting just 10 minutes in the 65-56 win over Campbell.

Again, we won’t know, because nobody in the media room thought to ask.