Heels Insist They Weren't Looking Ahead to Saturday

ATLANTA – An easy narrative following No. 3 North Carolina’s 74-73 upset loss at Georgia Tech is that the Tar Heels were caught looking ahead to Saturday’s tilt with Duke at the Smith Center.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time a team was victim of the proverbial trap game. But was that really the case Tuesday night at McCamish Pavilion? Or was this a case of a struggling team having lost eight of nine, that happened to beat Duke in this same building in December, simply catching fire while the favored red-hot club went cold for a night?

Ask the Tar Heels, and they quickly scoff at the notion they were looking ahead to the Blue Devils, even if many couch coaches are convinced they were.

“I would say that’s their opinion,” junior forward Harrison Ingram said. “I would say for us, it’s just one of those games you come out flat (and) they end up winning, and (if) anything twists; RJ makes a shot, I get the tip in, or anything like that, one more shot goes in we win and they don’t say that.”

Athletes often speak in cliches, but often they truly live by those simple sayings. UNC senior guard and ACC leading scorer RJ Davis is fairly straight forward about the good and bad during a course of seasons, and with respect to being caught in a trap game on The Flats, he says not a chance.

“No,” he said, when asked about looking ahead. “Today’s game was important because it was today’s game, and we weren’t looking past (them) to Saturday to the Duke game. We was looking at Georgia Tech because that was next on the schedule. Our mindset is always one game at a time, one day at a time.”

Teams have off nights, and it’s fair to chalk this up as one of those games. Carolina shot 36.4 percent from the floor, its worst outing of the season, and usually reliable from the free throw line, the Heels were just 9-for-17.

A one-point loss is such that had one more errant jumper gone in for UNC (17-4, 9-1 ACC) or a banked 3-pointer by Tech’s Kyle Sturdivant misses, the outcome very well could have been different. But it didn’t play out that way, Ingram said.

“For us, it was just a game where they came out with more,” he said. “And obviously, it’s easy to look to the Duke game as an excuse, but it’s really on us.”