University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Tar Heels Ready To Move Ahead
November 23, 2015 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
All things considered, Carolina's loss to Northern Iowa on Saturday might have been the least-seen Tar Heel basketball defeat of the Roy Williams era.
The game wasn't easily locatable on television, and aired at the exact same time as the football team's Coastal-clinching game at Virginia Tech. At the same time the Panthers were making their second-half comeback in Cedar Falls, Larry Fedora's Tar Heels were making things interesting and eventually going to overtime in Blacksburg.
So if a tree falls in Northern Iowa in November and no one hears it, does it really make a sound? Carolina, of course, played without Marcus Paige. But they still should've had enough weapons to dispatch a Panther club that already lost at home to Colorado State. Here are three factors that went into the defeat for those who might not have had the benefit of seeing the entire game:
1. Northern Iowa's post defense.
The Panthers, a team that made barely any post entry passes the entire afternoon, somehow managed to outscore Carolina 24-22 in the paint. Kennedy Meeks scored the first eight UNC points of the game, then didn't make another field goal until there was 1:57 left.
“They were doubling the post in the first half and that was kind of frustrating for us,” said Brice Johnson, who finished with 10 points. “They were getting it out of our hands. We thought we could make a quick move, but there was already someone on top of you.”
The doubleteam strategy got the ball out of the hands of Carolina's post players and coaxed the Tar Heels into being overeager from three-point range, where Paige wasn't available and Joel Berry and Nate Britt combined to go 2-for-8.
2. Wes Washpun's dribble penetration.
Washpun dominated a key stretch of the second half, consistently beating his man off the dribble and then either scoring or finding a teammate for an easy basket or three-pointer.
“I've done a terrible job of working on the screen on the ball, because we could never get (Washpun) stopped,” Roy Williams said. “A couple of times we didn't react, and the head coach is responsible for that.”
It wasn't purely a perimeter failure, either. Although the Tar Heel guards had a rough afternoon defensively, Carolina used some different post rotations in the second half, and those lineups sometimes suffered from a lack of communication.
“We didn't stay to our defensive principles,” said Justin Jackson, who scored a career-high 25 points. “In the second half, we got away from what we had said before the game, and that hurt us quite a bit. We weren't talking as much. Our rotations weren't as good. They got a whole lot of wide open shots from the three-point line in the second half.”
3. No finishing instinct.
This is perhaps the most concerning of the three factors, because it was a frequent point of emphasis this summer. The Tar Heels held a 16-point lead three minutes into the second half, only to watch Northern Iowa make three consecutive three-pointers in the next 90 seconds.
Nothing seemed to slow down the Panther onslaught—the Tar Heels, who didn't force a single second-half turnover, went zone for two possessions, which resulted in Northern Iowa making another three-pointer—and Carolina looked a little rattled offensively, including a stretch of three straight turnovers midway through the second half. Every really good team suffers an occasional reversion to what they used to be; if that's all Northern Iowa was for this year's squad, then we'll look back on it in March and barely remember the circumstances. The task now is to make sure it is indeed just a hiccup on the way to becoming a better team.
For now, the Tar Heels are just like every team in America, trying to work out a few November issues and get everyone healthy. The next three games—against Northwestern and then Kansas State/Missouri in Kansas City, then at home against Maryland—will provide a much bigger stage, and a much more complete gauge of where they stand a quarter into the regular season.
“We have to play better,” Johnson said on Saturday. “We made some big defensive errors. We have to learn from our mistakes.”
