North Carolina, looking for answers, finds some in 96-81 win over Virginia Tech
The lane was open, as wide as it will ever be. Jae’Lyn Withers gathered the rebound, took a step or two toward the basket and launched into the air, rearing back for a massive two-handed throwdown.
It thumped off the back rim.
There was a little of that from North Carolina on Saturday, a team that was just a hair off, not quite in gear. And yet the Tar Heels scored a casual 50 in the first half on their way to a 96-81 win over Virginia Tech, no pushover to be sure.
In our perpetual desire to apply narratives to the randomness of a college basketball season, you’d like to be able to put an authoritative stamp on this one. The Tar Heels, after losing three of five, have their mojo back! Or the Tar Heels, unable to put the Hokies away despite holding double-digit leads in both halves, continue to struggle!
“It’s probably somewhere in the middle,” UNC’s R.J. Davis said. It always is.
Over 30-plus games, the quest for clarity is a fairy tale. The truth may be out there somewhere, but it’s hard to discern from 40 minutes of basketball in isolation.
What can be determined from Saturday is that the Tar Heels have a lot of weapons (no surprise), that they don’t necessarily have to be at their best to win at home (although they’ve certainly lost when they haven’t been close to it), and that whatever malaise seemed to be creeping in at Syracuse appears to have been left there with the snow and ice.
Either way, the fifth overall seed in the NCAA’s bracket preview Saturday has now reached the 20-win mark, has a half-game lead on Duke and a full game on Virginia in the ACC heading into a week off before a pivotal trip to Charlottesville. It had four players score in double figures — Armando Bacot with 19 of his 25 in the second half, Davis with 20, Cormac Ryan with 16 and Harrison Ingram with 12 — while shooting better than 50 percent from the floor for the first time in a month.
Those were some of the answers to the questions that the Tar Heels were hoping to answer Saturday: Was their opponents’ improved shooting lately a function of bad defense by UNC or was the Tar Heels’ earlier success defending the 3-point line just a function of pure chance? And could the Tar Heels impose their will and finish out a win in a way that had eluded them lately, even in the win over Miami?
In a microcosm of the wild swings in UNC’s opponents’ 3-point shooting this season, Virginia Tech was 6 for 14 in the first half and 1 for 12 in the second, the inverse of the way things have gone for the Tar Heels since November. UNC allowed opponents to shoot 40 percent or better from 3-point range three times in its first 19 games. The Hokies were on track to be the fourth in the past seven before their shots stopped falling.
Then again, the evidence would indicate 3-point defense is mostly random anyway, and things even out over time. Which means, over the past month, Syracuse’s en fuego Tuesday evening was just the bookend of Wake Forest going 3 for 20. Virginia Tech managed to compress all of that variance into two halves of a single game.
This was a good test for North Carolina, with Virginia Tech the kind of middle-of-the-ACC-pack team that the Tar Heels should beat at home, but could easily get hot and pose a considerable threat — and with two high-scoring guards who have the capability to get as hot as Judah Mintz and J.J. Starling did for Syracuse on Tuesday. (They probably weren’t expecting Tyler Nickel, who scored in double figures once for the Tar Heels last season before transferring to VT, to score 14 in his return to Chapel Hill.)
While it’s easy to spin all kinds of conclusions out of this one, the reality is there’s really only one that’s close to conclusive.
“Our offense is always going to be there,” Davis said. “Our defensive mentality is what’s going to take us from good to great.”
The offense was certainly there Saturday. The defensive mentality was closer to where it needs to be. In the long arc of the season, this was a step in the right direction. But just one step.
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