In the first half UNC went on a 13-0 run and took a seven point lead. At this point in 13 previous games, the opposing team slowly fell apart. That did not happen and when BC absorb the blow and struck back, UNC did not have an answer. This one boiled down to the following:
Lack of defensive rebounding
Very few BC turnovers
BC hit clutch shots and most anything else they put up.
The Heels were completely inept at times on offense which included tons of easy shots missed and crappy FT shooting which included six missed in the final minutes.
That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less. It was not meant to be.
It is a sucky loss given it is to BC and you can only hope the Eagles end up being the 4th best team in the ACC to prove this was not a fluke. As far was what it means down the road. Who knows. It was a bad game and hopefully they will not have any more like this one. Obviously it ends the undefeated talk and in some respects it takes the pressure of ineviability off this team. Pitt will be the new #1 and UNC can take a step back and get ready for Wake Forest which is a game they absolutely cannot lose in terms of the ACC standings.
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As Nelson from the Simpsons would say, “Ha, Ha!”
Roy Williams should donate his salary from coaching to charity for this week. Terrible, terrible, terrible all around. He doesn’t even have the guys knowing which people to foul at the end of the game.
The Tar Heels looked like they were in a daze the entire game, losing grasp of every loose ball, missing free throw after free throw, missing dunks, which makes me wonder about the effect of jetlag.
The defense was pathetic until the end of the game. I don’t understand why Williams refuses to press until the situation is dire when he is substituting so freely. The Tar Heels look pathetic down low and the Heels let BC shoot three pointers uncontested over and over.
Why Williams persists in playing Bobby Frasor so many minutes puzzles me. Some of his coaching decisions almost make me wonder whether he was semi-attempting to throw this game to get the player’s attention and I am not one of those guys who thinks he knows more than the coach, at least usually.
In some ways, this was the perfect storm that everyone was mentioning, but it doesn’t erase certain facts. UNC does not have a true center and that can make a difference in some cases. Lawson has defensive problems that need to be addressed. The free throw shooting from Davis and Thompson is going to be problematic all year.
Bottom line is that this has been coming for a few games. They’ve been sloppy ever since breaking for exams and it was just a matter of time. They’ve got a gimme coming up but they ought to work their tails off this week to get it going against Wake.
Interesting UNC has only lost 3 regular season games in the last season and a half… and all are at home. Odd…
To me this game tells me nothing more than the Maryland game did last year.
totally agree with everything william. piss-poor game management in the last 1:46. I’ll say it: Dean would’ve pulled this one out.
College of Charleston is not a bad team. They have lost to Temple and Davidson and have beaten USC and are 10-2. We should win but it is hardly a gimme.
I think we were looking ahead to Wake. I have been thinking about Wake all week, and am guessing the team was also.
We could easily be 0-2 in the conference after next week!
I was shaking my head this morning reading the “close game” and “undefeated” talk in the paper.
BC exposed the weaknesses that tonight included a lack of intensity and hustle. The other problems are shaky 3 point and free throw shooting. As William mentioned
I thought Ed Davis should have been in the game instead of Thompson who appears to be taking his annual swoon to new heights. Bobby really looks awful unfortunately.
Not much to say, congrats to BC.
The number one team in the country should not be looking forward, i.e., downward towards anybody. If boredom is a problem, then we should be scheduling harder in the pre-season. Where’s the Davidson game this year?
Anybody remember the VPI game from two years ago? It was very similar to this game. At Kansas, Williams often lost games early in the season. I think he tries to avoid peaking too early, perhaps.
Wow. Where do I start, Man handled in the paint, Shockingly pathetic horrible perimeter defense, one of the worst free throw games I’ve seen in about 10 years. William, you are right about Frasor. Why is he in the game? He gives no offensive spark and on defense, well it doesn’t look like he trust’s his knee. But then again who are we going to put in to spell Lawson. Drew II showed that he is not ready for ACC play. Hansbrough ought to take a page out of Ed Davis’s book and QUITE PUTTING THE BALL ON THE FLOOR AFTER CATCHING IT SO CLOSE TO THE FREAKING RIM. How many times did he lose the ball after putting it on the floor after catching it 3 feet from the basket? 15?? Horrid. Can anyone tell me at what point during a game we might want to change up or defense from man to man to ohh I don’t know ANYTHING else?? Oh well.
Interesting William, that when we are undefeated and some people think will go undefeated you are on the bandwagon, yet seem in retrospect to know it all when we lose, and are so critical. Tell us these things in advance, and I’ll be a believer. Otherwise William, don’t act like you know more than Roy and have predicted this all along. Does this loss mean that like the football team we should let men’s basketball just go silently into the night? You want us to believe that you know it all, but please take this one as a lesson that you just don’t. Ha Ha to you.
Why is Roy getting blamed for it? We had it coming. I’m fine with it. We needed a loss. Bad game, ok we will work it out. I dont need to point out all the bad things we did but this isn’t March. We will live. We just need to focus.
Chris, I think anyone who has visited this site can tell you that I am here regularly. There certainly is no bandwagon effect.
And I certainly do not claim to know more than Roy. It’s his team and he is presumed to know why he has them do what they do. I merely attempt to point out anomalies the way an announcer or any fan might. Carolina seems to do very well when they press, so maybe someone will ask him at the press conference why he chooses to press so little. I wish the best for Bobby Frasor, who is a gritty and gutty guy, but lately, some of his shots are barely hitting the backboard. Granted, Drew had his worse game, so somebody had to be out there and I guess Ginyard is not really ready yet.
My “Ha Ha” reference was for all the Carolina haters out there who obviously are enjoying this, because if you want to be the best of the best, you have to be able to take the heat and saying it ourselves takes the fun out of it for them.
And I certainly never predicted that we would lose here to BC. I figured we would win by 13-17 points. In fact, what did happen here was a bit of the perfect storm. I think there must have been some West coast effect. Carolina played in a daze and I believe Carolina missed about 14 free throws. Hansbrough missed many, after shooting near a 90% earlier this year, not to mention all the balls that kept squirting out of his grasp.
I think people who check in to this site regularly will remember the discussion after the Valpo game, however, when several of us discussed Carolina’s potential weaknesses down low, which were visible in that game, just as they were against Kansas last spring.
Carolina’s national championship chances are no worse now than they were at 5:30 p.m. today. What has been lost is merely the chance this team had to distinguish itself in a way that no Dean Smith or Roy Williams coached Carolina team has ever been able to achieve.
I’m not sure that even focusing would help, we need more tougher interior defense better outside shooting and about two more all around athletes on the floor.
We played as poorly as we could play and still had it to one possession in the last minute.
We tend to lose some random game somewhere (see Maryland last year, GT in the title year) and this one may be it.
I am not from the school that “we need a loss” but at least that pressure is off now and Roy can preach the “you’re obviously NOT invincible” message this week. I’ll bet we we look great against CofC and Wake.
I’m going on the record right now and say that anyone who thinks Roy had anything to do with us losing this game is an idiot. Plain and simple. Nobody was questioning his coaching while he was becoming the winningest active coach in the country. That’s either hot headedness talking or lack of understanding of basketball (or just being drunk).
No, the Heels played without intensity, missed easy shots (how many layups did we miss?), and missed free throws. We also couldn’t string together 2 defensive stops in a row when we needed to. We couldn’t buy a basket when we needed one and BC couldn’t miss when we needed them to. Our defensive was porous at times and the offense looked out of sync. That’s why we lost. Believe me, if they’d have done what Roy asked them to we would have won.
One question. I was at the game (unfortunately) and wondered why the play in the last minute wasn’t a backcourt violation on BC? There was 25 seconds on the shot clock when they threw the ball inbounds and about 22 when BC crossed the halfcourt line. Did the announcers mention that at all? We should have had the ball down four with just under a minute to play, instead BC got fouled and went up by 6. Did I miss something?
The thing that bothers me about this loss is it’s the first time we’ve not shot well, and it seemed to carry over to the defensive end. Too many easy dribble penetrations, too many easy looks underneath and from the 3-point line. Too many guys (hello, Deon, Wayne and Danny) disappeared at crunch time. Ty and Tyler tried to take over, but they really didn’t have it going tonight.
I don’t think Roy lost on purpose or any of that kind of garbage. The team wasn’t ready to perform, and that’s where he’s taking some of the blame. With that said, we’re an experienced team and should know better. It’s hard to complain when we’re 80-11 over the last 2+ seasons, but these kinds of losses are hard to figure. We show little intensity, focus and don’t execute for long stretches, and we know what happens to teams like that in the NCAAs. You can’t coast on talent alone through the NCAAs.
I was talking with a Duke fan friend of mine who really knows hoops yesterday. He said Carolina plays just good enough defense and then just scores so much that they say ‘try to outscore us.’ Well, BC did that today, and I find it inexcusable to allow BC to score 80+ points in the freakin’ Smith Center on us. Do we have do defensive pride??? It doesn’t help that our best player overall is one of our worst defensive player. I think he’s been exposed this year as too slow laterally. I thought in Hawaii that Deon stepped up and provided some good defense, but not today.
I just wish we could see some toughness, grit, and good old-fashioned hard work from this group in a game like this. When we’re on and things are going good, no one in the country can come close to stay with us. To win a title, though, we need to learn to weather those bad times much better. If we can’t figure that out in the next 8 weeks, this group will be remembered as one of the most supremely talented Carolina teams ever (especially in the context of today’s college game) that didn’t get it done.
jet lag? that’s a cop out excuse. if they had perfectly adjusted to the west coast (which i doubt), tip off would’ve been at 2:45 PM PT. how would that have hurt?
i wanted to write this one off as another maryland loss but i can’t because this loss has everything to do with focus and intensity. when hansbrough decided to take over in the 1st couple of minutes in the 2nd half, he was awesome. when lawson decided to pick up his defensive intensity in the waning minutes, we were able to get stops. davis was solid all game but he’s a frosh with 5-6 upperclassmen ahead of him. we need someone to step up, beat his man off the dribble and create something. green? ellington? i keep waiting for lawson, but it just doesn’t happen. and we have no reason to have weak interior presence with our 3 bigs. and with all the hamburger boys, we have no excuses in terms of needing a couple of more athletes.
we better get back to our pre-exam intensity or we’re headed to another disappointing season.
I want to know why we have the weakest home court advantage of any ncaa team it seems. When a call is in question, it goes to the opposition. We get better officiating when we play non-conference games away from home.
Well, in fact, lots of people have questioned Roy’s coaching all along the way to his being winningest active coach. Kansas had some pretty bad flame-outs against UVa and Rhode Island back in the 1990’s. I have always thought the criticism was unfair, especially in a one and done tournament.
Others have severely questioned Roy right here on this site, particularly with respect to his refusal to use zone defense.
I think people have to understand the difference between saying someone (even a coach) had a bad game and saying that Williams is a bad coach. Roy Williams might arguably be the best coach UNC has ever had. He certainly has UNC in the midst of a several year pattern of success only rivaled by Dean Smith’s Heels of 1981-1987.
As James said, Dean Smith was a mathematics major who seemed to have a fundamental understanding of how to win games in the final mimutes. His players seemed to know exactly where to go and what to do and how to keep calm. Just look at the last four minutes of the 1993 National Championship for an example of this. Tonight’s Heels looked a little frazzled and uncertain during the last few minutes.
But there is a difference between saying Roy is an idiot for not playing a zone and saying, well, “Roy does press. Why doesn’t he press more?” Williams may very well wish himself that he had pressed more. Pressing might have been preferable to letting BC attempt so many completely uncontested three’s.
I may be wrong about this but I believe that Dean Smith has said that it is the coach’s fault when the players do not know key things at the end of the game, like how many times-out are left.
Here, Carolina kept fouling Tyrese Rice over and over down the stretch. He made 9-10 from the line and it simply made no sense. Just like with J.J. Redick, you might as well let him shoot because the free throws are automatic.
With respect to questioning playing decisions, this is more difficult because Roy sees the players all week and knows how hard they are playing and he might play certain guys just to get other guys to try harder. If this is his intention with certain subs, then you certainly can’t question it from a long-term program viability point of view.
Ultimately, Carolina got three points, three assists, no steals and four turnovers from Ginyard, Frasor and Drew. This puts enormous pressure on Lawson. Will Graves was a bright spot off the bench and Williams may be going to him more. All of a sudden, our depth seems less deep than before. Maybe the Heels do need Zeller. I wonder how his recovery is going.
First of all, I know why I mute the TV when FOX telecasts the UNC game. All they do is gush and gush about whoever plays Carolina, but that’s besides the point.
Awful effort tonight. UNC got punched in the face and didn’t know how to respond. Just like the Maryland game and the KU game, UNC looked like the playground bullies that had someone stand up to them and didn’t expect the fight and folded. Period.
BC got two more defensive boards than UNC (24-22), but UNC got 28 offensive rebounds compared to 16 for BC. Where UNC got into trouble, however, was that BC had ELEVEN steals (Sanders himself had seven) and UNC shot 15-27 from the free throw line. Tyler only shot 9-12, but Deon Thompson shot 1-6 from the line. If he put as much time in on boxing people out from the boards and his free throws as he has on his hook then he would be a beast. Teams won’t be afraid to get physical with him now, and even if he gets fouled, he has David Noel liability at the stripe.
In terms of individual performance, they all pretty much stunk tonight. As great as a player Tyler is, he’s very soft defensively. I’ve already discussed Deon Thompson’s liability, and Lawson had (his first game where) he had the same numbers of assists as TO’s, 4 apiece. Larry Drew also got a welcome to ACC play, with one assist and three TO’s.
Very poor effort tonight. For as great as this team is supposed to be, they looked like a seventh grade team for most of the game.
I am not a scientist and Carolina should have won anyway and all that, but the jetlag effect is not merely due to getting acclimated to West coast time, but is something much more subtle and pervasive that can take fairly long to go away.
The effect may occur first on the trip over and then is perhaps strengthened on the trip back. I think this is one of the least understood variables in sports, precisely because everyone agrees it has some effect, but only a small amount and no one really knows how much and what types of activities are most affected.
Wow, what a disappointing game to watch…BC definitely outplayed UNC, yet Carolina still had chances to tie or even win the game. Obviously a variety of reasons for the loss, but it just seemed like BC could do no wrong and Carolina could do no right.
I thought the same thing as William many times…the tempo is too slow, why not more press or trap? Make them play faster, get the ball out of Rice’s hands, make someone else beat the press or the trap…the man-to-man defense struggled mightily, they had trouble staying in front of the dribbler, didn’t screen out and left shooters wide open all night…
I agree that Sanders and Jackson shot better than they will all year, but when they get hot or make a couple in a row, can’t leave them open any longer…I also thought, like others mentioned, the defense picked up in the last 1:30 of the game, but at that point it was too late…
I also agree that Carolina couldn’t buy a call, especially in the lane, but I’m pretty sure that will happen all year in ACC play…gotta battle through that and find a way to overcome.
Very frustrating to watch, but as others said here or as THF said in the live blog, UNC couldn’t do anything right tonight while BC did absolutely everything they needed to get the win…14 missed free throws, 3 wide open 3’s missed on one possession trying to cut it to 3…just didn’t happen. Time to rebound from a loss and get better right away, especially on D.
Go Heels!
william, i understand. i’m not a scientist either. and it may also have to do with the total number of hours being cramped inside a plane. but these young men are 18-22 or whatever, and they should be expected to bounce back from that type of travel. either way, whatever that unmeasurable effect is, we’re good enough when playing focused to overcome that.
now if you tell me that jet lag impaired coach roy’s sharpness in coaching during the game, then…
I see a lot of talk about pressing Rice, but did you guys notice that every time we attempted to trap him he easily broke it and BC had an easy basket? Let’s face it, you can’t really press a guy like Rice, just like you can’t press Lawson. And keeping the ball out of his hands is easier said than done. If BC hadn’t been hitting their open shots early on, then I say gamble on Rice. But they were and we couldn’t afford giving up more easy baskets. Pressing and trapping Rice was not a good idea, so we stopped. Actually, Lawson played pretty good D on him, but when we trapped the other guy got in Ty’s way and allowed Rice to get by. Other times Rice got free when we did a poor job of defending the screens. Twice Will Graves left him and Rice proceeded to hit 2 threes. We needed to let Rice score his 30, but stop the other guys. We didn’t.
Sorry if my earlier post was a little harsh william, but you said “Roy Williams should donate his salary from coaching to charity for this week. Terrible, terrible, terrible all around.” That’s pretty outlandish and over the top. Roy’s coaching was not terrible, terrible, terrible, but our play was.
I stand by “terrible, terrible, terrible.”
Maybe the charity comment was over the top. He earns his money for the finished product and not any game in particular, but ask yourself, apart from mental mistakes, did Carolina look well prepared for this game?
The audio is not great, but Coach Williams sounds both a bit too laid-back and a bit defensive during his press conference.
Roy himself is saying that the team was not making smart choices about fouling. Why weren’t they? If we here at THF know the foul percentages of the opponents and whom we should foul, why don’t our players know that?
UNC’s players are saying that they were surprised by BC’s offensive sets and had trouble defending them. Why weren’t they ready for them? Do they have a lot else on their plate this time of the year? What was more important than knowing all the in’s and out’s of BC’s flex offense?
I find it strange that we can criticize the players’ performance but not the coach’s. It is a team and both players and coaches have bad games and bad weeks. Ultimately, if a team with this much talent doesn’t win, it doesn’t reflect well on Coach Williams. That doesn’t make him a bad coach but it does mean that he didn’t reach this group perhaps as well as he might have, either in this game, or in the season as a whole.
Coach Smith had an amazingly talented team in 1994 and I bet he would agree that he got less out of that group of players than probably any other season in his career. If Williams does not win it all this year, like Coach K got in 2004 and 1999 when his teams were heavily favored and didn’t win it all, there may be legitimate criticism.
Is UNC heavily favored to win it all? You bet, but herein lies the rub… even the most heavily favored teams are usually only put at about a 30-35% chance to win it all, which is where I believe the oddsmakers placed UNC in the preseason. So saying it will be a pockmark of Williams’ career if he doesn’t win it all is akin to saying the best baseball hitters are supposed to get a hit every time they are at bat; it’s just not realistic.
If UNC does not make the Final 4, like UNC in 1994 and Duke in 2004, that is reasonable grounds for criticism, as I believe the odds are, and were, greater than 50%.
I agree, C. Michael. To me, Williams’ coaching job in 2006 was a season for the ages. That was the most amazing season-long coaching job in Carolina history. To go 12-4 in the ACC and finish in the Top ten after losing his top seven players was simply incredible. Look where Florida ended up last year in a similar situation, the Semi’s of the NIT.
This is one of the interesting aspects about coaching where many fans and sportswriters see distinctions. Some coaches may be better at building a program and winning from year to year and other coaches may be better at winning during one season only, or with teams with particular types or quality of talent. This may be sort of the feeling that NC State people had about Herb Sendek, whose teams are always good, but rarely scintillating.
I have heard people say this about Mike Keenan, who used to coach the Rangers in hockey. In general, hockey people say that for one year, he was the greatest coach any of the players had ever had. By the second year, his schtick began to annoy the players. By year three, all of the players hated him and by year four, he was fired.
He was smart enough to only stay in NY one year though and he did get New York their one title in the last 60 years.
Some might compare basketball coaches like Frank and Al McGuire to Keenan (all Irish?) in their approaches. They seemed less interested in teaching basketball overall, than in teaching a particular team how to win that year. Al McGuire himself would later say that he wished his son had played for Dean Smith instead of at Marquette because he would have been a potential NBA player under Smith’s teaching.
Honestly, I think a lot of it is just luck. Both Frank and Al had some incredibly good fortune during their title runs, but there may be something to the notion that a system like Carolina’s is most efficient with good to excellent talent, rather than exquisite or creme de la creme talent.
Bobby Valentine is another example. As a Mets fan, I was amazed with how brilliant he was at in game strategy, and overall baseball knowledge. He is still the only manager I have ever seen argue a call, AND GET IT REVERSED! The problem was, my amazement with his ability was 1/100th of his amazement!!
As far as I’m concerned, if Roy continues to win 25-30 a year, with kids who are fun to root for, as people, then I guess I’ll take it…
Hard for anyone to complain about winning 25-30 games a year.
This one hurt especially though because I thought this team was going to be exceptional, and I deeply hated hearing Lawson saying that BC won because they wanted it more.
Hopefully, Ty and the others will get back to us and let us know when they (the Carolina guys) start caring enough to want to win as much as their opponents do.
Here is a great post that really hits the nail on the head:
Did I say UNC could go undefeated? Really?
Posted on: January 4, 2009 8:45 pm
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Gary Parrish
The flaw in my opinion that North Carolina could go undefeated wasn’t that the achievement is impossible.
The flaw was that I failed to recognize that UNC always loses home games it shouldn’t.
There was a home loss to unranked Miami three seasons ago; a home loss to unranked Virginia Tech two seasons ago; a home loss to unranked Maryland last season; and now there’s a home loss to unranked Boston College this season — an 85-78 home loss Sunday night in which the Tar Heels were 23-point favorites.
So long, perfection.
So long, No. 1 ranking.
So what the hell are we to make of this?
Answer: A lot and nothing, if that makes much sense.
It means a lot because it shows the Tar Heels are fully capable of screwing this up in the win-or-go home format that is the NCAA tournament. On various nights they have to outscore their opponents because their defense can be suspect, and that’s always going to be a concern, whether they can beat a quality opponent when they need 85 points to do it. On the other hand, it means nothing because you can check with any Las Vegas bookmaker and I assure you he’ll still have the Tar Heels as the favorites to win the ACC and national title even if they no longer have the nation’s best resume or body of work. So in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a big deal except for that it ensures UNC won’t be the first team to go undefeated since Bob Knight’s 1976 Indiana Hoosiers, and it probably takes the Tar Heels out of the running for Team of the Decade or Team of the Century or whatever.
And that’s too bad.
Because that’s what I thought they could be.
But now they look more like Ivan Drago with a cut over his eye against Rocky Balboa than Ivan Drago with a smirk on his face against Apollo Creed, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about you should really watch Rocky IV. To quote Duke the Trainer, the Tar Heels have been hurt, which proves they’re not machines; they’re men. And now they’re hurt men with a questionable home loss to an inferior opponent, just like they were at some point in each of the past three seasons, too.
http://gary-parrish.blogs.sportsline.com/mcc/blogs/entry/6271764/12717789
Nice job William.
William, What is VPI? Virginia Tech? Why do you call it VPI?
That is technically the proper abbreviation since the official name of the school is Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Georgia Tech’s official name is the Georgia Institute of Technology or GIT.
And Duke’s official name is Princeton Community College.
20 years ago everyone said VPI but now Tech’s sports information office requests that people call them Va Tech for short, but that is way more letters and spaces, so I prefer VPI.
There is a great story about a Georgia Tech recruit years ago holding a press conference to announce that he would be attending Georgia Tech University.