Lucas: Disrupted

By Adam Lucas

PITTSBURGH—Pittsburgh has now defeated North Carolina in four of the last five meetings, and these postgame quotes from Hubert Davis on the Tar Heel Sports Network could have been uttered about virtually any of those games:

"We drove to the basket and didn't drive hard enough or tough enough to get a foul or finish. We knew they would be physical on drives. When they put their chest on us on our drives, it knocked us off our path and disrupted us."

And that's basically the recent story of the Carolina-Pitt series. More often than not, the Tar Heels have been, over the course of the season, the better team. But more often than not, in a head-to-head meeting, the Tar Heels have been just disrupted enough to lose the game.

The most recent game in the series was a rare Friday noon tipoff, which will henceforth be known as the Jamarius Burton game. The Charlotte native (of course), who is on his third college stop, scored 31 points on 14-of-17 shooting—it should be pretty tough to make 14 of 17 shots in an empty gym—including 14-of-16 from two-point range. Nine of Burton's 14 field goals were classified as layups and three came with an accompanying Carolina foul.

There was no one Tar Heel defender responsible for Burton's outburst. Caleb Love took an early turn on him, but Leaky Black and D'Marco Dunn also took stretches on him, and none of them were able to consistently stop him. He was just too potent, too aggressive, too…disruptive.

"Nobody on our team could guard him," Davis said. "Nobody. We just didn't have an answer for him. He was able to consistently get to the basket, and it's hard to beat any team when you allow them to get 42 points in the paint (even with a 22-point effort from Armando Bacot, Carolina managed just 26 points in the paint, which should tell you just how little of the other offense was generated at the rim). At the end of the day, you have to get defensive stops, rebound, and execute on the defensive end, and we just didn't do that."

The Panthers came into the Smith Center last season and had a similarly physical approach—and then boasted loudly about it after the game, a fact about which the Tar Heels were reminded several times in practice this week.

And there were moments when the Heels played with the intensity they knew a game like this would require. In the first half, Bacot missed a questionable three-pointer, but then hustled all the way back and swatted away a Pitt shot, followed by running the entire 94 feet again to grab an offensive rebound off a Tar Heel miss.

Carolina was up by six at the time of Bacot's hustle. There was a similar stretch midway through the second half, when Leaky Black appeared to have drawn a Pitt foul, but no whistle blew. Instead of pouting about the no-call, Black raced back on defense and created a Panther turnover. Not coincidentally, Bacot (five) and Black (two) were the only Tar Heels who collected offensive rebounds.

But there simply weren't enough of those types of plays in a 40-minute game to earn an Atlantic Coast Conference road victory. A reminder: it's very hard to win these games. The scouting in league games is at another level; in addition to scoring his 31 points, Burton was also calling out many of Carolina's second half offensive plays, reading the play call from the bench and then shouting it to his teammates. That's a level of scouting sophistication—and, yes, disruption—you rarely see in the nonconference portion of the schedule. There's so much familiarity in league play that everything has to be that much more precise, that much more crisply executed. It's not the only reason why Carolina shot 9-for-27 in the second half and 1-for-9 from the three-point line, but it didn't help.

The Tar Heels had that type of intense execution in certain stretches. They called their use-it-or-lose-it timeout late in the first half and got two points off the ensuing play, and ran a nice Pete Nance-to-Bacot pass out of a timeout with 11:56 remaining.

On other occasions, though, the attention to detail simply wasn't there, with the most egregious offender being a Tar Heel stepping out of bounds with a minute left on a crucial possession in a three-point game. It's always possible to commit a turnover on any game-deciding play, of course. But you want it to be while trying to make something happen, not while dribbling 40 feet from the basket.

These two teams will meet again on February 1 in Chapel Hill and it will be interesting to see the differences in personnel and approach from the Tar Heels in the rematch.

"It's all about executing on both ends of the floor," Davis said. "Not for the majority of the game, but for the entire game."

Players Mentioned

Armando Bacot

Leaky Black

D'Marco Dunn

Caleb Love

Pete Nance

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