Five things to know after UNC’s first exhibition

North Carolina played its first exhibition game on Friday, and finished with a 91-80 victory against Barton College, a Division II school from Wilson. The Bulldogs hung around for a while – the score was tied at 24 midway through the first half – before the Tar Heels pulled away.

The second half was a slop-fest, to describe it in a particularly eloquent way. Barton outscored UNC 41-35 after halftime, and the Tar Heels committed 13 turnovers during the final 20 minutes.

You can never take too much away from exhibition games. For coaches, these games are a lot like a laboratory is for a chemist: a place to experiment, tinker with this, or that, and, in general, get a little bit weird and try some things.

UNC coach Roy Williams, for instance, gave 12 players at least six minutes of playing time, and 10 of them played double-digit minutes. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Williams said afterward he wanted to play “a bunch of bunch of guys.” And he did.

Five things of note:

1. Seventh Woods started, but Jalek Felton was the better point guard.

With Joel Berry out for at least two games – and maybe more – the greatest early-season question facing UNC (aside from what happens on the inside) is who starts at point guard in Berry’s absence. It’s a good guess that Woods, a sophomore, is in line to start. Williams, after all, usually defers to older players, and rewards them for their experience.

And so Woods started on Friday. He didn’t play particularly well, however.

“Seventh did not have a good day,” Williams said, bluntly, after Woods finished with four points and two assists in 19 minutes.

Felton’s line, meanwhile: five points and seven assists in 21 minutes. Both players committed but one turnover. Both players missed four of their six attempts from the field.

What is the takeaway here? Who really knows. It’s only one exhibition game. It doesn’t really mean anything. Still, Woods has a limited chance before the season begins to build some confidence, which is something he lacked much of last season. Asked about Woods’ confidence, Williams said:

“I think in practice he has (confidence), and I think today he just dribbled it a little too much … but I think he’s been more confident in the preseason, and I did start him. So that’s something.”

One exhibition game isn’t going to make or break anything. Woods will have a chance to play better in UNC’s jamboree next weekend, and there’s still almost two weeks worth of practices before the season begins on Nov. 10 against Northern Iowa.

2. Luke Maye impressed.

This comes, again, with the mandatory it-was-an-exhibition-game caveat, but a good night for Maye, nonetheless: 18 points, 11 rebounds, three assists, two blocks in 20 minutes. Maybe Barton’s royal blue jerseys brought out the best in Maye. The last time he saw such a uniform, he was in the process of earning South Regional MVP honors, and making one of the great shots in UNC history.

Who knows how this translates to meaningful competition, but Maye will be a difficult match-up for teams this season. He can score and rebound in the post and shoot from the perimeter, and he’s quicker than teams probably realize (remember: Maye won all of UNC’s preseason conditioning races). Maye, like Theo Pinson, gives UNC a lot of versatility, and Maye showed that on Friday.

3. Garrison Brooks is ahead of the other freshman big men.

UNC will enter the season without any proven traditional post players, and that’s probably the sort of thing that keeps Williams up at night, worrying. He remains completely committed, after all, to his traditional offense, which requires two players on the inside. The bad news for the Tar Heels is that there’s no Kennedy Meeks or Isaiah Hicks or Brice Johnson on this team.

The good news: Brooks might just be better than people expected. He looked more than serviceable – albeit against over-matched competition – on Friday night. Brooks’ final line: 13 points and nine rebounds in 19 minutes. He’s more polished than fellow freshmen Brandon Huffman and Sterling Manley, though Huffman blocked five shots in 13 minutes, and scored six points to go along with seven rebounds.

With Brooks and Maye, UNC’s frontcourt could be more formidable than many expected at the start of practice. Maye and Brooks combined to secure 20 of UNC’s 57 rebounds. They’ll need to do that consistently, given UNC’s lack of other proven rebounders.

4. Ol’ Roy is already chastising the home fans.

To use one of the worst cliches there is, college sports attendance sort of is what it is these days. Which is to say it can be a struggle, even for some of the most successful programs in the country. We see this everywhere. People have options, attention spans are shorter and going to games probably doesn’t mean as much as it once did, in an era when people couldn’t sit there and look at their phone for two hours.

And so the Smith Center was more than half empty on Friday night. Before tip-off, an announcement went out: people could sit anywhere in the lower bowl, provided no one showed up with a ticket to claim the seat. Yes, it was only an exhibition, but Williams found it disappointing enough to mention it afterward. He called the crowd “discouraging.”

(Note to Williams: the “Simba Cam” is also discouraging.)

For UNC’s next exhibition, which will come on Nov. 5 in a four-team jamboree, Williams said, “I hope we have more people than we had show up today.” Williams criticizing the home crowd has become a time-honored tradition. He does it regularly. Usually, he does wait until the regular season starts. Last year, he criticized UNC fans after the Tar Heels lost amid a deafening environment at Indiana.

This year, he criticized UNC fans after a meaningless exhibition victory against Barton. And so while his team isn’t yet in mid-season form, Williams seems to be.

5. Now we know the details of how Joel Berry broke his hand.

We knew that Berry punched a door after losing a video game against Pinson. The two are roommates. Pinson on Friday night provided the details. The two were playing one of the games in the NBA 2K series. Pinson was the Cavaliers, Berry the Warriors.

“I was whupping that butt,” Pinson said. “It was making him mad.”

Must have been quite the “whupping,” to use Pinson’s word.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was bad.”

Berry, by the way, did not have a cast on his hand on Friday night. He instead wore what appeared to be a lightweight protective covering.

And so there you have it. The good news, Williams said, was that “it was an exhibition game. … (We) got some silliness out of the way tonight, hopefully.”

This story was originally published October 27, 2017 at 11:25 PM with the headline "Five things to know after UNC’s first exhibition."