BLOOMINGTON, IN – All of the things that were question marks for North Carolina entering the season surfaced Wednesday night. And given that reality, the result at Assembly Hall was as one might expect: Indiana 76, UNC 67.
In fairness to the 13th-ranked Hoosiers, the game wasn’t as close as the final score. And that’s where the two heads that sprung from this performance must eventually merge. But before delving down that path, lets take a look at that preseason checklist with respect to this performance:
Go-to guy? Not tonight. Well, Justin Jackson (21 points) had the look at times, but not enough to carry the Tar Heels to a victory.
Post scoring when needing a bucket? The four bigs combined for 23 points and 16 fouls in 75 minutes. Only a couple of their baskets dimmed the crowd’s tone any, and only briefly. Roy Williams said his big guys weren’t aggressive enough, weren’t effective making themselves available, and thus the paltry numbers and disheveled offensive flow.
An eraser defensively in the paint? The Heels blocked 5 shots, but two were by guards Nate Britt and Kenny Williams. And given the number of weakside opportunities the bigs had to rotate over and affect Indiana floaters, runners and layups, the answer is Nope.
Bench? Try 14 points – 4 of which came in the final 5 seconds – and 6 rebounds in 58 minutes.
Leadership? It didn’t appear to be on the court, though the Heels fought back cutting the margin to 4 points with 4:29 remaining. Williams said leadership is born out of adversity but it also takes time, so we will check back in a month or so to see what has come of that need.
The bottom line is this was just one big ugly mess for the Heels.
“The home team really played right from the get-go, the second team did not, and that was us,” Williams said. "We were not ready for the intensity and the enthusiasm, or anything you want to talk about in the first half.”
The Hall of Fame coach was asked specific questions about things that didn’t go well, but he kept returning to a constant theme.
“Everything (went wrong),” he said. “We were not ready to play; I cannot say we did line up correctly. We did not shoot free throws, we didn’t rebound the basketball, we didn’t get loose balls, at the half they had more second chance points, they had 5 or 6 fast break points and we had none. Everything, everything.”
Needless to say, this performance bore no connection to what the Tar Heels did in the first seven games of the season. But, this is November, and the sneaking suspicion is Carolina will learn from this and be a much better, more fortified bunch as a result of this performance.
At least the Heels said the right things afterward, and that’s a start.
“We’ve got to come out from the start,” Jackson replied when asked what the lesson was Wednesday. “We dug ourselves way too big of a hole – we did way better in the second half – it was just too big of a hole.”
That hole was a 26-9 deficit 9:30 into the game, and it looked, sounded and smelled much more lopsided than that.
The Tar Heels were 3-15 from the floor and the Hoosiers had just capped a 12-2 run with a 3-pointer sending the crowd into a frenzy. It went into a lot of those on this night.
It’s hard to imagine the Heels playing any worse during a 9-minute stretch than that.
Defensive rotations were poor, guarding on the ball was almost as bad, close outs, box outs, everything, as Williams noted, just didn’t go right.
Offensively, things were really no better. So-so shot selection, too much dribbling, no flow, spacing issues, a lack of poise, and the shots were being taken by players that come later in the team’s order of preference. In fact, Isaiah Hicks didn’t officially attempt a shot in the first half, and the Heel with the most field goal attempts by the intermission, in which Indiana led 41-29, was Nate Britt, who was 3- 7 from the floor, including 1-4 from 3-point range.
A prevailing theme in the locker room was how surprised the players were they were so out-everythinged, especially in the opening half.
“I’m pretty surprised,” Berry said. “It’s a big-time game on a big-time stage and we just let them come out and hit us in the mouth first. I thought we were going to be ready, I thought I was going to be ready myself.”
Championship teams lose, and this group of Tar Heels was going to lose at some point while appearing rather mortal. That’s happened now, and it’s likely going to happen again, maybe a few more times. Such is the college basketball season, even for the land’s best teams.
Yet, what gives this game extended value is how the Heels grow from it. Some teams choose to simply put bad losses behind them while others use it over and over as fuel. You can do both, but the education from it must come first.
Again, that was the narrative in the locker room. It wasn't just one or two Tar Heels, either. It was all of them.
Hicks: “That’s how I (am) looking at it, we came back and was competing, we just dug ourselves a big hole and we can avoid that by just playing from the start.”
Britt: “This is a learning lesson. It’s not anything we can hang our heads about, we just have to learn from it and capitalize on it from here on out.”
Berry: “At the end of the day, this is not a time to panic. It’s just at the beginning of the season, and I think this is a good loss for us to learn that there still are some teams out there that can compete with us. We just came back from Maui, had a great tournament, so we wanted to win tonight but it didn’t turn out in our favor. I think we can learn from this game and realize we can still get better as a team.”
That’s the convergence. Great UNC teams have lost before, and usually a couple of times they lost ugly. But they learned from those performances because that’s what great teams do.
Whether or not this is a great team is yet to be determined and will take some time. Much of it, however, depends on the eventual value of Wednesday’s defeat.
