Isaiah Denis had almost forgotten about all the missed layups.
As the North Carolina men’s basketball sophomore guard surveyed the stat sheet in the aftermath of a 78-70 loss to Georgia on Friday night in the Dean E. Smith Center, he seemed taken aback reading through some of the numbers. The eight missed shots at the rim, six layups and two dunks — including one of his own on a fast-break opportunity in the first half — was several issues down Denis’ priority list as he read through some of the stats postgame. That’s the nature of a game this ugly. The Tar Heels shot 32.9% from the field and hit just nine of a school-record 38 attempts from deep, so the stat sheet is going to look alarming. But as Denis evaluated the game, offense was where he thinks things went wrong.
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“Just looking at the things that we can control ourselves effort-wise as a team,” Denis said, “so a lot to get better at.”
Coach Michael Malone still needs to look at the film to assess how many of the 38 threes were good ones. But he had a clip ready at halftime that he hoped might show the Tar Heels (3-1) what the real issue was that caused them to struggle in the first half and, eventually, squander a game Georgia (38.6% shooting) played pretty poorly offensively, too. There was a 50-50 ball in the first half. A who wants the ball play. UNC senior guard Terrence Brown took the blame for that play, he was the one near it. But it was largely agreed upon postgame by Denis, Malone and, presumably, the rest of the Tar Heels that an offensive struggle for both teams would be decided by who’s able to create the most havoc on the other end.
But despite some stretches — one in particular, a 12-3 run near the start of the second half — where that seemed to resonate with the Tar Heels, UNC’s “bad habits” emerged when faced with the close finish.
“At the end of close games, your habits come out,” Malone said. “Do you have good habits? Do you have bad habits?”
Malone felt the negative outshined the positive, which was evident as the Bulldogs outscored UNC 27-10 in the final 10 minutes, 35 seconds of the game. Malone said UNC didn’t have attention to detail, didn’t have “game-plan discipline, nor “personnel discipline.” In close games, that will haunt them. It didn’t need to be a close game, though. While Malone subtly corrected a reporter who suggested the Tar Heels let Georgia back into the game, saying that they always were, UNC’s best stretch of basketball resulted in a nine-point lead, 60-51, with 10:35 left in the game.
It was a stretch that erupted as the result of a run of 12 straight points in the fast break. But that end result is only so replicable if the Tar Heels aren’t getting stops. So why was Denis’ 3 at 11:24 the last of 16 fast-break points the Tar Heels scored? Because immediately thereafter, suddenly, UNC couldn’t stop a Georgia team that had struggled all game. The Bulldogs just had too many chances to squander.
The first issue to emerge in a closing stretch where it felt like everything went wrong happened on the offensive glass. UNC pulled in 16 offensive boards, but the defensive rebounding still faltered as Georgia pulled in 18. Brown said that’s about attention to detail. He echoed a point that Malone made earlier in the season that rebounding is a “want-to thing,” not a skill. But UNC showed some real deficiencies boxing out the Bulldogs, to the point where Brown said they might have even been using it as a strategy.
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“It feels like they’re just putting up shots to just go grab them,” Brown said, “not even to make them.”
Three of the Bulldogs’ final eight field goals came on second chances, scoring 10 second-chance points in the final 9:07. One of the last ones, though, was particularly maddening to Malone. He suggested for most coaches, a failed free-throw box-out would drive them “absolutely bonkers.” And that’s exactly what the Tar Heels did. Georgia forward James Scott missed the front end of a one-and-one with 3:13 left, effectively giving UNC a gift, up by one point. But the ball bounced high in the air, Scott rebounded himself. Georgia missed two more shots, and grabbed two more offensive rebounds — the second, a tip-dunk by Scott to take a 67-66 lead, emphatically ended a rough moment for the Tar Heels …
… That is, before the next possession, when they allowed an offensive rebound and more second-chance points to sacrifice another lead.
There’s a way that Malone wants this UNC team to play: defend, rebound, run. That’s why he showed the clip at halftime, and that’s why when the Tar Heels were getting stops and running the second half, everything looked a lot smoother. But as the brutal ending unfolded, the Tar Heels demonstrated a lot of the same problems. Brown said they talked about the assignments all week, running certain shooters off the line, yet Georgia hit a pair of threes in the final 1:48 that sank the Tar Heels for good.
Malone gave the Bulldogs credit: Georgia executed down the stretch. The Tar Heels, on the other hand, have a lot of room to grow. Denis simply needed to look at the stat sheet for that to be clear.
“A lot of things we did today to beat ourselves,” Denis said. “So just got to focus on those things and lock in.”
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