UNC basketball passed first March test in a way that bodes well in most important month
Hubert Davis played for the New York Knicks during the mid-1990s, in a time of rugged physicality in the NBA and for the team that most personified the grittiest, most bruising period in the league’s history. That’s part of why he didn’t think much of the mini-skirmish here on Saturday early in the second half of North Carolina’s grind-it-out 79-70 victory against N.C. State.
It was heated, for a brief moment, after Elliot Cadeau and Casey Morsell found themselves entangled; Morsell committing a foul and Cadeau releasing himself from the fray with a what-was-that-about kind of look. Players from both teams rushed in. Some came nose-to-nose. There was some talk and puffed chests, officials in the middle trying to bring calm.
The scene didn’t much register with Davis, who undoubtedly had been a part of countless similar moments during his time with those rough-and-tumble Knicks teams. This, on Saturday at the Smith Center, “was nothing” in comparison, he said.
“I played in the 90s,” Davis said, emphasizing the decade, “where a fight could break out and you could still play.”
This, meanwhile, wasn’t anything close to a fight. It wasn’t even a flagrant foul. But it was a small moment that underscored the Tar Heels’ willingness to scrap, which has quietly become a part of this particular UNC team’s identity. Davis hopes there’s a little more than a month remaining in his third season as UNC’s head coach and if there is — if the Tar Heels manage a deep run through the NCAA Tournament — part of it will be attributable to how they won here on Saturday.
They did not have their “A” game, for long stretches. They didn’t make a shot from the field during the final four minutes of the first half, when they surrendered a 14-1 run that left the Wolfpack in control (however fleeting that control might’ve been). They found themselves trailing by 10 points early in the second half, with the Smith Center quiet, with the realization that, well, this wasn’t going to be easy, after all, despite UNC’s ritual dominance in this rivalry.
And then, with a suddenness, the Tar Heels snapped out of it. They played with a sense of fight.
“I felt like when things got a little chippy, it ignited us a little bit,” Davis said.
With a strong finish over the final week of the regular season, and during the ACC tournament, UNC could well earn a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Tar Heels haven’t been a top seed since 2019, though if they are this year it’ll be the fourth time in the past 10 years that it has happened. UNC’s three most recent teams to be a top seed all played with some finesse.
The 2019 team was a fast-paced machine that fizzled late. The 2017 team won the national championship on the strength of Justin Jackson’s mid-range game, and Joel Berry’s direction at point guard. The 2016 team nearly won the national championship, after shedding a label that it was soft. The 2009 team, also a No. 1 seed, ran through the tournament like few teams ever have.
A different kind of identity has come to define this particular UNC team, this year. The Tar Heels, at times, can score with the best of them. But they’ve also shown an affinity to win ugly. To survive off nights or weird nights or afternoons like Saturday, when a double-digit deficit inspired a defensive resurgence, which in turn led to an onslaught on offense.
“I feel like that’s been the theme all year,” said RJ Davis, who scored 42 points last week against Miami and finished with a quieter 14 against the Wolfpack on Saturday. “The wins are always not blowing out teams by 20 or being up by 30. We always win the tough, gritty ones.
“And it’s always chippy ... I think we like those kinds of games, and I just think it prepares us for what’s to come in March. Because every game is going to be neck-and-neck. It’s going to be a dogfight. So I think we’re ready for it because we’ve been in it all year long.”
Undoubtedly, the first half against State on Saturday left many a Tar Heel fan flustered in living rooms across North Carolina. Just like those who might’ve been wearing red had hope, as much as any State fan could muster given the Wolfpack’s familiar misery in this series.
And then soon enough it all felt familiar, as if we’d seen this somewhere before. A Wolfpack meltdown in Chapel Hill? That has happened a time or 10 in recent years. A UNC team that looked befuddled and out of sorts working through a funk and coming out on stronger on the other side? That has grown familiar, too.
If there’s one characteristic Davis has tried to instill in each of his first three teams, it’s that of a will to fight. It was a message he drove home constantly in the days before UNC’s victory at Duke in 2022, when his team spoiled Mike Krzyzewski’s final home game. It was a message that, for whatever reason, his team often didn’t receive a year ago.
This team, meanwhile, has proven to be Davis’ most consistent group of fighters yet. A 10-point second-half deficit is nothing they can’t handle. Same thing for an awful finish to a first half, or a cold shooting stretch, or a downtrodden rival gaining confidence and belief. The Tar Heels on Saturday seemed happy to quash those good vibes, like a big brother toying with the younger.
Not that it was easy. Even the end was a little shaky, after UNC had restored order.
“To be able to win ugly games like this, it’s amazing,” said Armando Bacot, the fifth-year forward who finished with 13 points and seven rebounds. It was another challenge, he said, in which the mission became “finding different ways to win.”
“I think that’ll be huge for us, especially in March, because you’re playing so many different teams. And, obviously, every game is going to be close and tough and just finding ways to win when things aren’t going our way — I think that’s a huge skill.”
It was perhaps fitting on Saturday that Harrison Ingram, the junior forward, led UNC in scoring, with a season-high 22 points. Ingram is arguably the Tar Heels’ grittiest player and this was a game that invited such mettle — a game with plenty of talk and elbows and tie-ups and the well-timed slight shove every now and then, out of view of an official’s eye.
“He likes that kind of stuff,” Hubert Davis, laughing — not of shoving, necessarily, but of competition that requires a little more physicality and a little less finesse. And so it was no wonder that Ingram thrived Saturday.
Meanwhile, for the Tar Heels at large, an old college basketball adage is that teams want to be playing their best in March. UNC might not be, given how good it looked throughout late December and most of January. They are, though, playing their grittiest basketball of the season.
It can make for a frustrating viewing experience, for fans. It can make for a kind of Jekyll and Hydian dynamic, where UNC might look lost for a bit before finding a way to climb out of whatever it hole it created. By now, though, the Tar Heels’ ability to persevere cannot be questioned. They’ve grown accustomed to finding a way.
“It would be nice to win every game by 50,” Hubert Davis said. “But that’s not life. You’re going to have to work, you’re going to have to compete, you’re going to have to prepare.”
Saturday was UNC’s first game of March. It passed its first test of the season’s most important month, and in a way that could prove beneficial what with all that awaits.
