UNC basketball moves to 3-0. What we learned in Tar Heels’ 72-66 win over Gardner-Webb
Coach Hubert Davis wasn’t seething and seeing red as No. 1 North Carolina slowly allowed a 16-point lead at home over Gardner-Webb to dwindle to five.
He sure did see a lot of yellow though.
The Tar Heels (3-0) failed to close out strong in their 72-66 win over the Bulldogs (0-3) on Tuesday at the Dean E. Smith Center. And it marks the third game in as many tries this season that Carolina looked uninspired. With the exception of the second half against the College of Charleston, UNC hasn’t played to its potential.
“I don’t think there’s a red flag in terms of our team, I think there’s some yellow flags,” Davis said. “I think there’s some yellow flags in terms of our toughness. I think there’s yellow flags in terms of our sustained effort. I think there’s some yellow flags in terms of our commitment to defense. I think there are some yellow flags in terms of our commitment to the scouting report and doing the things that you’ve been asked to do. I think there’s some yellow flags in terms of getting to the offensive glass. And I think there’s some yellow flags in terms of sharing the basketball in terms of good to great.”
Carolina jumped out to a 16-point lead in the second half at 47-31 and enjoyed a double-digit lead for most of it. But the Heels didn’t put them away. The Bulldogs cut the lead to 61-56 and twice had the ball with a chance to make it a one-possession game.
R.J. Davis drew a charge on one possession and forced Julien Soumaoro to miss a layup on another and UNC held the lead around nine until Anthony Selden’s 3-pointer at the buzzer.
Armando Bacot, who finished with 10 points and nine rebounds, was disappointed in the Heels effort.
“I guess I just expect more out of us,” Bacot said. “But it’s early on in the season.”
Hubert Davis also expressed his surprise, because he thought the team would have “a hunger and a thirst” that he just hasn’t seen yet over an entire game.
They’ve done it in patches, like in the second half of their win over College of Charleston last week. They looked to duplicate it when they started the second half with a 10-0 run and the combination of Bacot, Caleb Love and R.J. Davis combined to make seven of their first 10 shots from the field. Love scored 17 of his team-high 20 points in the second half.
But the Heels couldn’t sustain their hot start. It led Hubert Davis to openly consider benching players who aren’t performing with the intensity and attention to detail that he desires.
“One of the things that I think helps with hunger and thirst is playing time and lack of playing time,” Davis said. “As I said before, it’s been a long time ago since I played, but I do remember that that gets your attention. And that’s one of the things that, over the next three or four days, it will be addressed. It will be reevaluated and it will be tweaked and pivoted and changed and altered to make sure that we’re playing the way that we can play out there on the floor.”
Here’s what we learned from Carolina’s victory:
Nance’s official welcome
Pete Nance shouldn’t be compared to Brady Manek. But after No. 1 North Carolina’s tougher-than-expected 72-66 win over Gardner-Webb, the graduate transfer from Northwestern proved, just like Manek did last season, why he was a coveted addition to the lineup.
Nance, who finished with 18 points before fouling out, gives the Heels another scorer capable of carrying the offense. He scored 14 of the team’s first 18 points Tuesday en route to 16 first-half points on 5-for-7 shooting from the field. He had just eight field goal attempts in their first two games and a total of 13 points.
Nance shot 45 percent from 3-point range last season, but had missed his first three attempts in Carolina’s first two games. He connected on his first three shots from behind the arc against the Bulldogs.
It was a good time for Nance’s breakout game, because the rest of the Heels combined to shoot just 4-for-24 in the first half. UNC’s 29 percent shooting was its season-low for a half.
“As everybody can see, there’s a lot of stuff that we can do a lot better,” Nance said. “But that’s the beauty of it being three games in, we have a lot of time to be able to figure this thing out and just get everybody on the same page. But at the same time, we are 3-0 and I’ve never heard of a bad win.”
Rebounding still a question
Carolina was outrebounded in consecutive games to non-conference opponents for the first time since 2014 as both UNC Wilmington (35-32) and College of Charleston (37-32) won the battle of the boards.
They at least rectified those numbers against Gardner-Webb, leading 40-38, thanks to an unlikely source.
R.J. Davis led the team with 10 rebounds. It was the second time in his career he had double-digit rebounds. The first came in last season’s national title loss to Kansas when he had a career-high 12 rebounds.
“Not a lot of people know that I’ve always been like a good rebounder, ever since high school, for my size,” said Davis, who added it’s an “underrated” part of his game.
Hubert Davis was quick to point out that the 6-foot-1 junior guard’s performance on the boards, “wasn’t about technique, it was because he wanted to get the ball.” He lamented that Carolina’s rebounding effort was lacking.
The players know it, too.
Bacot still leads the team in rebounding overall this season, averaging 8.0 per game. But that’s considerably down from the 13.1 rebounds he averaged last season en route to 31 double-double games. The senior forward has yet to record a double-double this season. He said teams have made it a point to keep him off the boards.
“I mean, last year I had a lot more one-on-one opportunities,” Bacot said. “And I guess the ball is just not finding me.”
Bacot said the Heels were nowhere close to where they needed to be as a team rebounding, and he was critical of his individual effort.
“Our goal going into every game is we want to win the rebounding battle by about plus-15,” Bacot said. “We haven’t done a good job of doing that and we’re playing against a lot less athletic teams than we’ll be playing going further. So it’s something we got to figure it out. But I can remember my freshman year, we kind of had those problems and turned it around so it’s something that can be fixed.”
This story was originally published November 15, 2022 at 10:21 PM.