Will Wade says beating #11 Virginia will be a ‘monumental task’, talks about what his team has to do to make it happen

Will Wade met with the media yesterday to talk about his team’s upcoming matchup at #11 Virginia. Here is what he had to say.

Wade on UVA: Virginia’s playing great. They’ve got great personnel. They’re huge, they’re kind of the opposite of who we are. Their physicality poses a lot of issues for us. This will be a monumental task tomorrow, and hopefully we can play better and get off to a better start than we did in the first game. We’ve got to not let our offense, because it’s going to be tough sledding against the best defensive team in the league, affect our defense. Any chance we have, we’re going to have to be better defensively and get a few more stops than we’ve been getting.

Wade on Jacari White: The first time around, they didn’t have White. He was out, so he’s kind of value-added. He’s made them even better. He’s instant offense. You could argue he won them the Florida State game with how he played, and he did the same thing against Miami. So it’s another player you’ve got to really account for. I think they’re even better than the first time we played.

Wade on Sam Lewis: He had five threes against us the first time, so you start with he can shoot. He’s physical, can finish inside, good offensive rebounder, just does a lot of winning things. He does a good job in transition getting to the rim. He’s just an all-around very good, very efficient player.

Wade on how his team has changed: We’ll see tomorrow. Everything’s in theory until we see if we can do it tomorrow. We have to match or exceed their physicality. I’m very worried about that. They’re extremely physical. They’re one of the best offensive rebounding teams in the conference, they were number one going into the Miami game in offensive rebounding, and that’s an area we’ve certainly struggled with.

Wade on the week off: We didn’t do what we did the last time we had a week off, so hopefully we’ll try something different and it’ll help us out. We tried to simulate a game last time, and then we came out and were awful against Georgia Tech. Hopefully some of the changes will work a little better this time around.