UNC basketball pulls away late to beat WCU. Observations from Malone’s debut
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- UNC beat Western Carolina 80-72 in Michael Malone's first game as coach.
- Western Carolina shot 10 of 23 from 3, while UNC missed 21 of 30 attempts.
- Western Carolina outrebounded UNC 41-32 and grabbed 13 offensive boards.
Neo Avdalas said Michael Malone didn’t say much in the locker room after his first win as the North Carolina men’s basketball coach.
Just that they’ll watch film, keep getting better in the aftermath of an 80-72 win over Western Carolina on Monday at the Dean E. Smith Center.
The Tar Heels set a bit of a low bar, but Avdalas said after this one, they’re just going to rest. Another game Friday — long season.
“You can’t just stay in one game,” the Tar Heels’ sophomore guard said.
While the final score doesn’t paint the picture of a true scare, UNC (1-0) was, for a large portion of the game, in danger of suffering a loss that would have been a rough start the Malone era. The first game of his tenure in Chapel Hill was not pretty. But the Tar Heels made it out with the win. And now they have to keep going, Avdalas said.
“How we won, it wasn’t the best,” Avdalas said. “But a win’s a win.”
The Tar Heels weren’t taking any victory laps after Monday’s performance — certainly not after one game, certainly not after that game. A lot of the same issues as the preseason appeared for the Tar Heels, especially as they were outrebounded 41-32 in the game. The 3-point luck factor played a role, as Western Carolina connected on several late in the clock in a 10-of-23 performance from deep. The Tar Heels missed 21 3s on 30 attempts.
Western Carolina (0-1) was predicted to finish eighth in the Southern Conference coaches poll in the preseason. UNC fired Hubert Davis this past offseason because it didn’t want to be just competitors in the ACC. Monday had some good moments. But the Tar Heels still aren’t where they need to be.
“Right now we’re a team that takes two steps forward, three steps back,” Malone said he told the team. “We can’t sustain anything.”
And it’s those same troubles that made it difficult for them to separate. UNC scored 10 points before Western Carolina connected on its first field goal 4 minutes, 17 seconds into the game. But the Tar Heels couldn’t create much separation beyond that in the first 20 minutes. Their largest lead in the first half was 11, and that was after creating 10-point leads twice more.
Yet Western Carolina cut the second 10-point lead in half in just a minute, and went on a 13-6 run after the second third 10-point lead to make it 30-27 with 5:00 left in the first half. Malone called a timeout, and UNC built its lead back to 39-28 with 1:23 left in the first half, and closed the frame with a 39-30 lead.
It happened again in the second half, though. After the Tar Heels got out to a 13-point lead, 43-30, just 1:12 into the second half, Western Carolina ripped off an 8-0 run to cut the lead to 43-38. And just 3:23 later, the Catamounts capped a 7-0 run with a layup to cut the Tar Heels lead to 48-47.
“When we see progress, we go back to our old ways,” UNC guard Terrence Brown said, echoing Malone’s earlier point. “Just being able to snap out of it and keep going forward instead of going back to our old habits is definitely what we need to what we need to do.”
The Tar Heels struggled to string multiple makes in a row all game, doing so just eight times. But even when junior guard Jaydon Young connected on two 3s in 24 seconds after Western Carolina cut the lead to one point, suddenly, they couldn’t get stops either. The Catamounts made 4 of 5 baskets in row to keep UNC within 54-52 at the 12:37 mark. Then after Western Carolina guard Jaeden Roberts hoisted a shot-clock-beating 3 a few possessions later, the Catamounts came a missed open layup and a missed open alley-oop dunk within taking their first lead of the game.
That lead sat around a possession for several more minutes. But then the Tar Heels got a break. Western Carolina was called for a personal foul, and then Western Carolina’s Tayeshaun Smith shoved freshman center Sayon Keita at halfcourt, resulting in a technical. UNC got four free throws in a row, and made all four to push the lead to 69-62 with 5:25 left. A 5-0 run by UNC after the Catamounts hit a pair of free throws pushed the lead to, again, 10 points: 74-64 with 4:15 left.
UNC didn’t have to sweat it out much more beyond that. It had done that plenty enough earlier.
“We’re all happy about the win, but we also know that there’s work to be done and improvements that we need to make,” UNC guard Matt Able said. “Because we’re going to play a lot better teams, and I feel like we need to be prepared for that.”
Here’s what stood out from the win.
It’s time to hit the panic button on the Tar Heels’ rebounding
Malone said that it’s not like forward Jarin Stevenson and center Sayon Keita aren’t playing hard. But four rebounds from the Tar Heels’ starting frontcourt is not enough — and Monday marks the second game in a row with that output.
So now, the concerns go deeper than just a one-off. Because UNC has clear lineup concerns. Keita doesn’t look like an overly-strong rebounder so far. He had just two on Monday. That’s not forward Stevenson’s game either. He only had two as well. And off the bench, UNC is without a big guy who can enter and immediately be a force on the boards. Guards Neo Avdalas (seven) and Terrence Brown (five) each paced the Tar Heels in rebounding, and for as many as they secured, there were also some sacrificed by trying to push the ball in transition before securing the ball. Western Carolina grabbed 13 offensive boards.
UNC doesn’t have the rebounding talent to mess around with it. And on Monday, it didn’t show the fight to the ball that it needs to be a competitive team on the glass, likely, at any point this season.
“I think that’s just effort,” Adams said about the rebounding. “I mean, we all have to crash. We have to rebound the ball, and that’s pretty much it.”
Matt Able gets going
Matt Able missed the Tar Heels’ final preseason game. But he said there’s no concern.
“Oh nothing, man,” he said when asked about the injury he was dealing with. “I’m all good, 100 percent.”
It looked like it on Monday. Able said in the preseason that part of why he decided to come to North Carolina was to explore what he could do with the ball in his hands. Yet he didn’t need the ball in his hands very long after catching a pass in the right corner just over a minute into the second half. Able drove right-handed, and dunked the ball with his left, flexing at the Western Carolina defender after the Tar Heels extended their lead to 43-30 with 18:48 left.
It was a slow preseason for Able, but that was the most thunderous play in a game that featured — by far — his best moments in a North Carolina uniform so far. He scored 18 points on 6 of 10 from the field.
“Obviously,” Able said with a smile, “I like seeing the ball go through the net.”
UNC men’s basketball runs with all-bench lineup
Just as Western Carolina was starting to gain momentum, pulling the score within three points with 4:59 left in the first half, Malone made a change. He subbed out four starters — Avdalas, Able, Brown and Stevenson — and brought in the bench.
It wasn’t the first stint for a lineup featuring no starters, reserve guards Isaiah Denis, Young and Angelo Brizzi sharing the floor with reserve forwards Maximo Adams and Alex Samodurov. The quintet played a 1-minute, 26-second stint earlier in the half and Malone kept them in for 2:33 after the post-timeout change. It was a clear experiment by Malone, who will be undermanned as long as South Dakota transfer Cameron Fens remains ineligible. The Adams-Samodurov frontcourt will be one to watch in particular.
“(Malone is) finding different matchups and rotations early in the season to see how everything’s going to play out,” Adams said. “I mean, coach does a good job trusting us off the bench, so he’ll continue doing that.”
This story was originally published November 2, 2026 at 9:32 PM with the headline "UNC basketball pulls away late to beat WCU. Observations from Malone’s debut."
