Did Virginia finally nail the portal?

How Tony Bennett revamped his roster in the matter of a month

The past half-decade of Virginia basketball can be easy to oversimplify — and to catastrophize. The story is simple and tempting: A mild-mannered throwback coach whose anachronistic methods brought him admirable success is overcome by the pace of change around him, by a world whose values have too rapidly changed. Tony Bennett had always envisioned Virginia basketball as a very specific thing, as a project he could build in his own image. Then the transfer portal happened. Then Virginia basketball became something else, something watered down, something worse.

You heard a lot of this in the wake of Virginia's First Four defeat to Colorado State in March, or some version of it, anyway. The embarrassing denouement to an offensively bereft season was meant to indicate, not for the first time, that a core element of college basketball roster construction — about finding and retaining ACC- and national title-level talent — had fully passed Bennett by. Adapt or die, and all that.

The real story is is much more nuanced. Indeed, since the national title in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic (and the widespread immediate transfer eligibility the latter helped usher in) Virginia has embraced the reality of the transfer portal in its own way. Its first post-COVID season featured Sam Hauser and Trey Murphy, elite talents that both spent exactly one season in the lineup. Every team since then has had at least

Still: You can't help but feel like Virginia's portal participation has been more by necessity than design. Players leave — players who, once upon a time, you would have slowly developed into stars. They must be replaced. Those replacements might be average, or they might be really good, but what they won't be is completely psychologically attuned to your system in the same way as a fourth-year former redshirt junior that worked his way up from a eight minutes per game to 28, in the way that all of Bennett's former players attest is necessary.

And so Virginia's recent teams have often felt slightly ad hoc. The pieces can make sense in and of themselves, but the whole feels oddly incomplete, strewn together, missing the serene balance of earlier versions. Bennett is a brilliant tactical coach, but he has been forced to tinker with rotations and lineups more in recent years than he ever did earlier in his tenure, and surely more than he would prefer; he has searched for his best lineups, prevaricated nearly as much as fans have and ultimately failed to replicate the success of his golden period in Charlottesville.

Despite Virginia's willingness to go in the portal, and to bring in veteran players at a healthy rate, it has always felt like the portal era has worked more against Bennett and his program than for.

Until this spring. This spring, with this roster, maybe, finally, Virginia figured out the portal.