With March Madness here, UNC basketball searches for one last push for success

It was nearing 1 a.m. on Thursday morning inside the Spectrum Center — not too long after North Carolina’s 80–79 loss to Clemson Tigers men’s basketball in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals — when Henri Veesaar and Caleb Wilson were both asked a simple, and simultaneously difficult, question: How are you feeling?

“Pretty bad,” Wilson replied, his eyes trained on the ground. He let out a brief laugh before continuing. “Just trying to look on the bright side. You know, just trying to cheer my teammates on.”

“Pissed off. Sad. Disappointed,” added Veesaar, who finished with career highs of 28 points and 17 rebounds. “I know there’s a lot of fans that drove up here, paid hard-earned money for this ticket. We let a lot of people down in Chapel Hill. They root for UNC everywhere in North Carolina.

“So obviously it sucks for all of us in this locker room. But I know there’s a lot more other people that were disappointed as well.”

Perhaps the most frustrating part for No. 19 North Carolina Tar Heels men’s basketball is that, in many ways, the Tar Heels feel like they already know the answers.

They just haven’t applied them consistently.

“We know the pieces that we had and we know the things that we can do,” senior captain Seth Trimble said. “But now we just gotta go back to the drawing board and understand what we have to do to really get there.”

The evidence has surfaced in flashes — sometimes within the same game.

Against Clemson, North Carolina trailed by as many as 18 points in the second half before clawing back within a single possession in the final seconds. Down the stretch, Veesaar barked instructions and challenges to teammates. Derek Dixon knocked down tough shot after tough shot. The Tar Heels defended with an edge that had been absent earlier in the night.

But the fight arrived late.

“We just didn’t give effort the whole game,” guard Jonathan Powell said. “Then the last five, six minutes we finally decided to play hard.”

March Madness is here

The Tar Heels are now heading toward Selection Sunday having lost their final two games and with no guarantee beyond the next one.

“Now it’s March Madness,” Powell said. “If we lose, we’re done.”

In many ways, though, the blueprint for how North Carolina wants to navigate tough moments like this was introduced months ago.

Before the season began, coach Hubert Davis handed each player an individual preseason handbook. On the cover was a simple graphic: every player’s name placed inside a circle, with the circles overlapping one another.

The message was straightforward.

“And I said this is a tight group and we have to stay together…and the guys have really done that this year,” Davis said earlier this month. “And I think that contributes to being able to still be successful with the adjustments, with the changes after losses, to be able to regroup and just continue to move forward.”

The concept quickly became a daily mantra. Now, every pregame huddle ends with the same phrase: “Just us.”

Were the idea quantifiable, Trimble said it might be the team’s most important statistic.

“That’s the most important thing on this team,” Trimble said earlier this month. “Keeping our circle just us, hearing only us and relying on just us takes us such a long way.”

In the noise surrounding a program like North Carolina — where every performance invites outside analysis — the phrase serves as a kind of shield.

Veesaar said Davis constantly returns to the image of the circle.

“Everybody’s in it, and we all fight for each other,” he said. “Everybody’s equal.”

The challenge, he added, is protecting that circle when outside voices inevitably creep in.

“There’s going to be people telling you what you should do with your game,” Veesaar said. “Be more selfish. Do this, do that. It’s about keeping all the noise outside and keeping it inside the team and doing what’s best for the team right now.”

For a group that has spent much of the past month adjusting — particularly after Wilson’s two hand injuries — that mentality has become even more important.

Players insist his absence isn’t an excuse. If anything, they say it has sharpened their focus.

“We hear all the noise that we can’t do it without Caleb,” Dixon said. “We want to prove people wrong.”

Still, the Tar Heels understand belief alone won’t carry them very far in March.

Execution will.

“We gotta be better,” Dixon said. “The fight’s gotta be there the whole game. It can’t be the last five minutes when we’re already down.”

UNC’s pieces for success remain

The good news, if there is any after a loss like this latest one to Clemson, is that the ingredients are visible.

Veesaar’s dominance inside. Trimble’s leadership. Dixon’s shot-making.

The warning sign is that those moments have often come only after adversity forces the issue.

“We played desperate,” Veesaar said. “But we play good when we’re desperate.”

As Selection Sunday approaches, the Tar Heels know the margin for error has disappeared. The circle Davis drew months ago is still intact. The belief inside the locker room remains.

Now comes the harder part: proving it over 40 minutes.

“I know there’s just a lot of people that care about this,” Veesaar said. “And I care about it. I hope for the rest of March we can bring joy to other people and play as hard as we can.

“That’s the best feeling in sports — winning in the postseason.”

For North Carolina, the answers may already be there. The question is whether they’ll use them before they run out of time.