UNC basketballs latest loss raises even more questions for preseason No. 1 team

BLACKSBURG, Va. — It’s the only question worth asking right now, after North Carolina’s precipitous two-week plunge:

What is wrong with the Tar Heels?

Simple question. Not-so-simple answer.

This time 10 days ago, Hubert Davis’ team was proudly wearing the No. 1 ranking next to its name. Now, after Sunday’s 80-72 loss to Virginia Tech? Four straight losses, four straight face-plants against the only high-major teams these Tar Heels have seen. No top-ranked preseason team has ever lost four consecutive contests … until now. All that’s left at this point, to certify such a sordid slide, is the next iteration of the top-25 rankings, which certainly won’t include the team from Chapel Hill.

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“I’m not panicked. I’m not any of that,” Davis said postgame. “This is a good basketball team, and I’m convinced that we’re gonna be a great basketball team by the end of the season.”

Maybe. Maybe eventually.

But at present, Davis’ squad looks a little like a smashed windshield: hard to tell which nick was first, which initial crack spiderwebbed out until the whole thing shattered.

There are, of course, some constants — none of them more overwhelming than the team’s lackluster 3-point shooting. Through nine games, North Carolina is only making 29.2 percent of its 3s this season, worse than 307 other Division-I teams, per KenPom. That trend tracked once again on Sunday, as UNC made just three of its 17 3-point tries — the fifth time in nine games this team has hit 25 percent of its 3s or fewer. Both starting guards, Caleb Love and R.J. Davis, are shooting 26.2 percent from deep, in a 10-percentage-point reduction from last season.

The impact that has? Constraining everything else on the court, shrinking both an offense’s space to operate and the number of things a defense has to actually defend. Without the viable threat of a 3-point marksman, Virginia Tech’s defenders could afford to be aggressive with their defensive coverages, regularly hard-hedging in the first half without fear of UNC passing around to the open man.

“When I played, I just knew the percentages were gonna even out, so if I was 0-for-10, I knew that a 10-for-10 game was coming,” Hubert Davis said. “That’s not just my hope, but my confidence with a lot of our shooters: that there will be a time where they can close their eyes and it’ll start to fall.”

Until that point, though, opponents will keep pressuring North Carolina’s ballhandlers, forcing them to fight through double teams and sap seconds off the shot clock. “You’re coming off the ball screens and you see that hard hedge, drop coverage, it kinda makes it harder for you to turn the corner,” R.J. Davis said. “And then once you try to turn the corner, there’s a guy in the gap, so it’s not enough spacing to get downhill and be able to make a play.” That means re-setting, sometimes re-screening — but all the time, having to work harder for clean looks.

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Asked what more 3-point shots falling would mean to this offense, R.J. Davis chuckled: “It would help us out a lot.”

Last season, Davis scrapped the secondary break North Carolina was so known for in favor of a four-out, spacing-based offense. The results spoke for themselves: a team that knocked down almost 36 percent of its 3s, thus opening up driving lanes for Love and Davis. But that team also shared the ball at a significantly better rate than this one. And early on Sunday, when North Carolina had assists on its first two baskets, it looked like this squad might finally be figuring out some better ball movement.

Then it didn’t have another assist for over 30 minutes of game time.

So much for that.

Which is how UNC ends up, as it currently stands, with more turnovers (104) than assists (97) on the season. Credit the Tar Heels there — five of their 10 turnovers Sunday came in the first six minutes, with only five more the remaining 34 — but a 6:10 assist-to-turnover ratio stresses that the ball is still too stagnant too often.

Know who got a first-hand look at that Sunday? Armando Bacot, who did not play Sunday after suffering a bruised right shoulder three minutes into Wednesday’s loss to Indiana. Bacot warmed up pregame with assistant coach Sean May but told the coaching staff pregame he wouldn’t be able to play. Asked afterward how long he’d be out, Bacot said he didn’t know a timetable, “but I’m going to work hard and see what I can do.” His absence certainly didn’t help matters against the Hokies — who out-rebounded the Tar Heels 39-25 and 10-4 on the offensive glass — but does come at somewhat fortuitous timing, for two reasons: 1) UNC doesn’t play for an entire week, giving the big man some time to heal; and 2) it allowed him a courtside vantage point for how this team plays.

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“I kinda see now from that standpoint — like, from y’all’s point of view — just how things sometimes are stagnant, and how we’re missing out on a lot of opportunities, and just not fully following all the details,” Bacot said. “So for me, I thought it was a learning point.”

If subpar shooting and bad ball movement are two recurring reasons for UNC’s offensive struggles, then lapses in defensive details also warrant attention. Several times Sunday, as has been the case throughout the course of this season, the Tar Heels just lost track of Virginia Tech’s guards, allowing the Hokies to score 17 layups — the same number Tennessee had during last season’s Hall of Fame Tip-Off tournament blowout.

Obviously, some of that was because Bacot was out. If the senior is bunkered down in the post, there’s more opposition for those drives, and in the second half when Justyn Mutts got loose for 21 of his eventual 27 points. Even if he had been, those lost backdoor cutters still could’ve come free from ballwatching guards.

Put all those different deficiencies together, and this is the result: a team without any good wins, now 0-1 in conference play, and with most of its marquee early-season swings behind it.

This isn’t to say that Sunday doesn’t have some silver linings. UNC’s full-court press, extended and applied over the last 15 minutes, slowly led to steals and shorter defensive possessions, which in turn became transition offense and a dwindling deficit. In fact, without Bacot, without any true 3-point threat, despite falling behind by as many as 18, a steal and layup by Love with 3:06 left made it a three-point game — and Love had a free-throw attempt to cut it even closer.

Pressure defense is clearly something positive the coaching staff can take away. “That’s something that I thought not just worked in this game,” Davis added, “but I think it can work moving forward.” And along those same lines — and in keeping with Davis’ push for positivity — give credit to freshmen Seth Trimble and Tyler Nickel, both of whom stayed on the floor for the majority of UNC’s 19-8 second-half run. With sophomore D’Marco Dunn also out Sunday — he broke his left hand during Saturday’s practice and will be out several weeks — a team that receives the fifth-least bench production in Division I, per KenPom, desperately needed someone to step up. It got two someones, both of whom played their most minutes yet this season.

“Defensively, they competed,” Davis said of Nickel and Trimble. “It didn’t matter whom they were guarding, that person knew they were there. (Their presence) was felt. They were doing the things that we’ve asked them to do.”

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But silver linings, after this sort of four-game slide, only go so far.

At some point, they have to become staples.

So, what is wrong with the Tar Heels?

Too much, at least for the time being.

“We’re in this position, and I feel like you’ve got to hit adversity to overcome it,” R.J. Davis said. “Losing four straight is not what we wanted, but I feel like we’ve kinda hit a bump in the road a little bit, and this will be good for us. We’ll build off this, we’ll look back on this, and then turn this whole thing back around.”

(Photo of R.J. Davis: Lee Luther Jr. / USA Today)

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