Lucas: Breathing Room

By Adam Lucas

RALEIGH—Sometimes you just get a bad feeling.

Carolina led NC State, 54-48, on Sunday afternoon. There were ten minutes left in the game and a crowd that had sprinted through the PNC Arena aisles to secure the most coveted midcourt seats was largely staggered. The Tar Heels had survived the expected early-game surge of emotion that included a student yelling the de rigueur, "Go to hell Carolina!" on the arena video board.

They'd done it with solid but unspectacular play that included limiting their second half turnovers after their first half miscues had essentially kept State in the game (the Pack shot 5-for-8 off UNC turnovers in the first half and 7-for-32 otherwise). They'd controlled the rebounding battle. And they'd made just enough shots—not a huge amount, but enough to be in position to control the game—to take a six-point lead with a chance to build on it.

The Tar Heels had the ball three different times in that situation, which closely followed a lengthy officiating review of apparent PNC Arena security cam footage from the 1990's that ground the game to a halt. Here's the good news: they were getting the defensive stops to create those three chances.

Bacot pushed DJ Burns away from the basket outside the three-point line and forced Burns to give up the ball, leading to a missed jumper.

Leaky Black and Bacot combined to force Terquavion Smith into a wild missed runner.

Black created a deflection on a transition chance that turned into the first (!) Wolfpack turnover of the game.

That's winning basketball. On the offensive side, unfortunately, it was not. Because in response to those three defensive stops, the offensive possessions looked like this:

Caleb Love missed a driving shot and the Tar Heels turned it over on an offensive foul.

The Tar Heels misplayed one of their very rare fast break chances, leading to another turnover.

The ball never left RJ Davis' hands and he missed a jumper with 17 seconds on the shot clock.

I keep a written play-by-play of each possession during the game. And, like so many Carolina fans who have that built-in intuition about the flow of a game, as soon as that Davis shot bounced off the rim, I wrote, "Big stretch" beside the three missed opportunities. You probably did too, or texted your buddy or shot a concerned look at the people watching the game with you. It just felt ominous.

You were in good company.

"We were up by six with a little less than ten minutes to go," Hubert Davis told Jones Angell on the Tar Heel Sports Network. "We had three opportunities to extend the lead. We had gotten stops, and we had an opportunity to score. On those three possessions, we had two turnovers and a missed layup. That allowed them to get some easy points to tie the game and then (Jarkel) Joiner took over."

A few seconds later, Joiner was driving straight to the basket and scoring over Bacot. That was Joiner's initial contribution to a stretch in which Joiner and DJ Burns combined to score 28 of 31 NC State points. In that span, they combined to shoot 13-for-15, meaning they made more field goals in that 11-minute stretch than the entire North Carolina team did in the full second half.

And that is how the game changed. Sure, it was a two-point game with 5:30 to play, and Carolina had the ball with a chance to tie or take the lead. But one of the easiest ways to win on the road is to never let the game come down to those one-possession trips—the Tar Heels had already missed the chance to take control of the game and secure a much-needed big conference win several minutes earlier.

Instead, the Heels are now .500 in the ACC and staring a trip to Notre Dame in the face. That's a troublesome spot for a team that has shown little ability to play at a consistently excellent level for a full 40 minutes.

"It's not just (executing) towards the end," Davis said. "It's throughout the entire game. Look at how many second chance opportunities they got in the first half and how many of our turnovers resulted in points. Take that away or cut it in half and instead of going into halftime down one, you're up ten. It's throughout the entire game when the discipline and details in terms of taking care of the basketball, boxing out, getting loose balls, getting into sets, and running at the right pace—those are things that you have to be consistent with throughout a game. It you do it throughout the entire game, you have the opportunity to have a little breathing room at the end."

There was no breathing room at the conclusion of Sunday's defeat. And now this stretch has eliminated any cushion whatsoever from the remainder of the regular season and ACC Tournament.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Leaky Black

RJ Davis

Caleb Love

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