Lucas: The Defense Rests

By Adam Lucas

CHARLOTTESVILLE—On a night when there were numerous storylines, Hubert Davis immediately identified perhaps the least obvious one when he sat outside the Tar Heel locker room after Tuesday's 65-58 loss to Virginia.

He didn't mention the absence of Pete Nance, who didn't play, or the loss of Armando Bacot just 1:18 into the game. Bacot suffered an ankle injury and did not return. Even without the pair, Carolina had a seven-point second half lead that disappeared.

He didn't talk about Carolina's turnover issues, with 13 miscues leading to 19 Virginia points.

He certainly didn't address history, as Carolina now hasn't won in Charlottesville since 2012—when Davis was still an ESPN analyst and hadn't even joined the coaching staff yet. Not only had Seth Trimble not played a game as a Tar Heel yet; neither had his brother, J.P. Tokoto. The ACC had 12 teams, and one of them was Maryland. Bacot was in elementary school.

Davis wasn't interested in the past. Instead, he identified the key to the game as being Carolina's defense—or lack thereof.

"It's our commitment and consistency to the details and discipline you have to have to win games like this at this level in this league on the road against a team like Virginia," the head coach told Jones Angell on the Tar Heel Sports Network. "There were too many blow-bys. We allowed too many offensive rebounds. There were too many loose balls we didn't get to. We have to be more sound defensively."

The numbers, unfortunately, support Davis' assertion. The Cavaliers shot 53.6 percent in the decisive second half, their best shooting half of the season against an Atlantic Coast Conference opponent. Coming into the game, they had played ten halves of ACC basketball, and had shot better than 50 percent from the field in just one of those halves.

Virginia missed its first two shots of the half, and went scoreless on the first four trips while adding in a couple of turnovers. But then they went on a game-changing stretch of points on nine straight trips, making seven of ten field goals, converting four free throws, and getting two baskets off offensive rebounds.

The flurry, which lasted 5:41, saw Carolina go from leading by seven to trailing by four. They would get the contest to a one-possession game just once in the final twelve minutes. Down just 61-58 after an almost impossible Caleb Love three-pointer with a minute remaining, two Tar Heels appeared to miscommunicate on a ball screen at the top of the key (and also didn't play it especially tenaciously), leaving Reece Beekman with a virtually unimpeded path to the basket, which he finished with a two-handed dunk.

As Davis had stated very eloquently, to win that type of game against that type of opponent in that type of setting, there simply has to be a greater commitment to detail. Are there other factors? Sure. It would have been nice to have Bacot standing under the basket when Beekman drove for his uncontested dunk. The Tar Heels' road struggles continued, and they're now hitting just 28.4 percent from the three-point line in the four true road games this season, and 40.7 percent from the field overall in those games.

Even more perplexingly, the Tar Heels now have a road assist/turnover ratio well below 1.0, as they sit at 34 assists and 44 turnovers in the four road games, a ratio of 0.77. In the games not played at road sites, the assist/turnover ratio is 1.27.

The chance to improve the road statistics comes very soon, as Carolina will be back on the road Saturday at Louisville. So far, the hot shooting games have been the exception rather than the rule for the 2022-23 Tar Heels. And if that's the case, it only underscores even more dramatically the need to make the big stops, to being completely committed to preventing all five opponents from scoring.

"Defense is defense," Davis said. "Regardless of who is out there on the floor. To win games like this you have to be tough, work hard and be disciplined. At times, and consistently, we weren't all three of them."

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Armando Bacot

Caleb Love

Pete Nance

Seth Trimble

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