After another lead lost late, UNC basketball hopes loss to Stanford acts as wake-up call

As Jaylen Blakes walked around the Dean Dome on Friday night, watching the Stanford staff scrimmaging against team managers, he thought back to Austin Rivers’ legendary buzzer-beater for Duke against North Carolina in 2012.

Blakes had never been more than a role player in his three years at Duke, but the Blue Devil-turned-Cardinal let himself dream about what it might feel like to silence the crowd in Chapel Hill.

A day later, on Saturday, he turned that dream into reality.

With UNC up by one point and 7.7 seconds on the clock, Blakes took the ball the length of the floor, drove into UNC guard Seth Trimble and unleashed a step-back jumper.

The ball swished through the net, silencing the Tar Heel crowd and giving Stanford a dramatic 72-71 victory — its first win over North Carolina in program history.

“As a kid, you dream about it,” Blakes said. “I saw it and [was] able to live it.”

For North Carolina, the ending felt like a stroke of déjà vu — another close game slipping through the Tar Heels’ fingers.

Leading 66-61 with roughly four minutes to play, the Tar Heels were poised to close out what should’ve been a standard conference victory. Instead, lapses on defense, costly turnovers and missed opportunities piled up once again, culminating in a damaging loss to Stanford at home.

“I’ve been there in my junior year where I didn’t make it [the NCAA Tournament] at all,” UNC graduate guard RJ Davis said. “I want to avoid that again.”

‘I wanted to contain him’

Trimble, who picked Blakes up in the game’s final seconds — guarding him tightly as Blakes raced down the court — saw the shot sink and froze.

“I wanted to contain him,” Trimble said. “I definitely thought he was going to try and draw a foul, get to the basket, so I didn’t prepare myself for any type of step-back. I ain’t seen him shoot that all night. He definitely shocked me with that one.

But at the end of the day, I take pride in being a defender for our team. I take pride in leading them on the defensive end, so I got to step up and make that play.”

Blakes’ game-winning step-back jumper with 1.5 seconds remaining will be remembered by the Cardinal as the moment Stanford stunned UNC — a first for the ACC newcomers. But for the Tar Heels, it was more of the same: a tight game, late in the second half, that unraveled.

Ian Jackson never came alive, finishing with six, and North Carolina struggled to manufacture good looks in the half court.

UNC only recorded one field goal in the final five minutes.

“It’s a game we should’ve won,” Davis said. “Stanford’s a really good team, and there were a lot of plays where we didn’t execute well — especially down the stretch.”

The graduate guard gave a few examples.

At the 2:23 mark, Ven-Allen Lubin — who recorded a season-high 13 points off the bench — lost track of star big man Maxime Raynaud in the corner, allowing Stanford to cash in on an open 3-pointer.

Then, Davis committed a costly turnover 10 seconds later, his telegraphed pass to Elliot Cadeau picked off by freshman guard Donavin Young.

“Just costly defensive mistakes,” Davis said. “We were able to get good looks, attack the basket late, get fouled and get to the free-throw line — and made both free throws. They [Blakes] just made a tough two at the end of the day.”

Familiar mistakes

UNC coach Hubert Davis didn’t shy away from acknowledging his team’s recurring execution issues. He harped on details. Little things. Little mistakes. In varied phrasing, he repeated the term at least 10 times in Saturday’s postgame press conference.

Those mistakes weren’t confined to the final minutes, though. The Tar Heels struggled to match Stanford’s intensity in the first half — an issue Lubin, RJ Davis and Trimble all pointed to as a key factor in the loss.

It’s an issue that plagued North Carolina for most of its nonconference slate — a bad habit the team had seemed to kick in recent performances.

In three of UNC’s last four games entering Saturday, the Tar Heels built a double-digit lead in the opening half.

Against Stanford, they held on to a one-point advantage at halftime.

“I couldn’t really figure out why that wasn’t there,” Lubin said of the team’s early energy on Saturday. “I was pretty pumped up for this game. I just think that once we start at that level of intensity and that energy level that we gave the past few games, we would’ve taken this game with us. I believe that we just gotta do better. We have to have that from the jump.”

The miscues late were particularly frustrating for a team that has repeatedly preached attention to detail — especially in crunch time.

With the loss and its implications on North Carolina’s NET ranking — North Carolina’s loss to Stanford was the team’s first loss against a non-Quad 1 opponent this season — UNC finds itself at a critical juncture. Players like Davis are keenly aware of what’s at stake.

For Blakes, Saturday’s game was the realization of a childhood dream. But for North Carolina, if the Tar Heels take it to heart, the loss could serve as a wake-up call.

“This is a tough one to sit back and understand that we have to take it one game at a time,” RJ Davis said. “We got Tuesday night to get better — an opportunity to get better — against a really good Wake Forest team.”

This story was originally published January 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM.