University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Rapid Reactions
February 28, 2015 | Men's Basketball
By Adam Lucas
1. What a finish for Brice Johnson, who was all over the floor on both ends in the second half of Carolina's road win. Johnson's best possession might have come when the Tar Heels didn't even score, as he battled for multiple offensive rebounds and eventually ended up on the floor to secure a loose ball with five minutes remaining. The UNC junior finished with 22 points and 10 rebounds.
2. Marcus Paige didn't have a great shooting game, but his energy and aggressiveness set the tone for the kind of effort the Tar Heels would need to win on the road. Paige drew a head-cracking charge in the first half on Davon Reed, and his boxout helped draw a foul and put Miami's leading scorer, Sheldon McClellan, in early foul trouble. Paige was fairly obviously looking for his shot more in the first half than he has in recent games, and Carolina needs him to take those shots even when they're not going in.
3. Carolina's best offense was forcing turnovers from the Hurricanes. The Tar Heels shot nearly 60 percent on the possessions that followed Miami miscues, many of them on transition sprints to the basket. Key among those plays were the active hands of J.P. Tokoto, who was officially credited with four steals. Three of those steals led directly to six easy points in transition for his team.
4. Saturday showed a changing of the Tar Heel guard rotation. Joel Berry II used most of the backup backcourt minutes in place of Nate Britt. Playing roughly three hours from his hometown, Berry had an assist on one of the biggest shots of the game (a Marcus Paige three-pointer) and then hit his own tiebreaking three-pointer in the final nine minutes of the game. Britt played just five minutes and was shaky in his only second-half appearance.
5. There's been significant chatter around the Atlantic Coast Conference this year about the benefits of earning one of the league's top four slots in the regular season, for which the reward is a double bye in the ACC Tournament. As other leagues have found, however, the teams with a double bye don't always have the best chance of winning the event. In fact, just by the logistics of the tournament, a team with a double bye is probably playing a better opponent than they would with just a single bye, meaning the first game is likely to be more competitive for the double-bye teams than for the top single-bye teams.
At this point, of course, the chances of Carolina getting a double-bye are negligible, and the best hope for Greensboro is to be one of those single-bye teams that wins an early game, builds some momentum, and makes a weekend run.
6. Luke Davis and Theo Pinson were back in uniform, although not cleared to play. Pinson would be valuable perimeter depth and defensive presence for a team that needs both.
Speaking of injuries, Carolina caught a huge break with Miami guard Angel Rodriguez essentially being unavailable. Rodriguez had his right wrist heavily taped after taking a hard fall earlier in the week, and in the three minutes he tried to play in the first half was limited to playing virtually entirely left-handed. Rodriguez would have made a big difference for the Hurricane offense.
7. NC State's Mark Gottfried used three quick timeouts early in the second half to stem a Carolina run on Tuesday night in Chapel Hill. Miami's Jim Larranaga tried some similar early stoppages that weren't quite as successful, and that left him with just one timeout in the final two minutes, when his Hurricanes needed to run some better sets.
8. Solid job by Justin Jackson to nail six straight free throws in the final two minutes of the game. Both trips to the line came in one-and-one situations, as Miami plainly wanted to foul anyone other than Marcus Paige. Counting a couple pairs from Paige in the final minute, the Tar Heels hit ten straight from the charity stripe as they prevented any thought of a 'Cane rally.
