North Carolina’s cathartic win over Tennessee shows the Tar Heels belong
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — If it felt cathartic, that’s because it was.
Need reasons why, plural? There’s plenty of ’em. This, for starters: North Carolina ’s basketball team flew home Saturday from the Bahamas, where it was participating in a very winnable Battle 4 Atlantis tournament ... without a trophy. So? Well, bringing that trophy back to Chapel Hill was an explicitly written goal in every UNC player’s locker.
“So the fact that we went out there and lost,” freshman guard Elliot Cadeau said, “just made it really personal.”
Armando Bacot , the team’s fifth-year center, even had trouble sleeping once the team got home. Two, maybe three hours a night. “It was tough, just how everything went,” Bacot said. “I wasn’t my best.”
It sounds funereal. For (checks notes) a 2-1 weekend, with a win over Arkansas and the lone loss — the team’s only one this season — in overtime, by 2 points, against Villanova .
But that’s context — context the Tar Heels, quite frankly, don’t care about.
They lost. They did not intend to. And they’re pissed they did. Fin.
Or how about this as another warranted reason to get up for Wednesday’s game against No. 10 Tennessee : The fact that two seasons ago, Hubert Davis’ first as head coach, UNC played Tennessee in one of Davis’ first marquee nonconference games ... and got completely “cooked,” to use the head coach’s terminology. You think Bacot and senior guard RJ Davis , the lone holdovers from that team, don’t remember that? Please. This program, especially of late, has broad shoulders. Plenty of room for a chip or 13.
“We don’t forget,” Bacot said, “how bad they beat us a few years back.”
Not to dumb it down, but it’s simple. Proud program. Embarrassing loss. Grudge established.
But if we’re being honest, that grudge — the one No. 17 UNC set out to vindicate Wednesday — isn’t just against Tennessee. Sure, the Vols are part of it. That’s a way-back wound, after all. But really, it’s much larger, much more widespread. It’s rooted in the fact that since Davis became head coach — outside of that magical month and a half in spring 2022, when the Tar Heels were 20 minutes from their seventh NCAA championship — North Carolina’s reputation has been ... well, relatively un-UNC-like. Not befitting a blue blood, that’s for certain. That glistening No. 1 preseason ranking last season doesn’t count, either; it was predictive, presumptive and, a month into the season, plainly untrue. The rest of last season was a slog, a six-month slip back into boos and embarrassment that, frankly, a program of UNC’s caliber simply should not experience.
Ever.
That’s why the loss in the Bahamas hit a nerve. It was blood in the water for fans and reporters and anyone even remotely interested in college basketball — and the players knew that.
So they did something they frankly hadn’t yet done under Davis, at least not outside of that mad, mad March.
They turned into a freaking buzzsaw and reminded the college basketball world what a North Carolina team is supposed to look like: North Carolina 100, Tennessee 92.
“Really,” Bacot said, unflinching, “we was just trying to put the world on notice.”
How you do that? By taking the nation’s No. 1 adjusted defensive efficiency, per KenPom — “We don’t really care about that,” Bacot chimed in — and straight-up shredding it, possession after possession after possession. Tennessee hadn’t allowed more than 71 points in a game all season, and that mark came against top-ranked Purdue and star center Zach Edey .
It allowed 61 in the first half against UNC.
“It was pretty tough, man,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said. “I’m sitting there watching like, what are we doing? I must have said that 20 times in the first (half): ‘What are we doing?’”
Nothing good, clearly. UNC climbed out to an early lead off two Harrison Ingram 3-pointers — he’s at 48.5 percent from 3 this season, by the way — but everything turned during one 13-0 first-half run. The first play of that stretch: A triple hockey assist around the perimeter that ended with a perfectly pure Cormac Ryan corner 3. Then two Bacot free throws, a Jalen Washington top-of-the-key 3, three more Ryan free throws, a Washington putback inside and, voila, game blown open. A 26-12 lead, less than eight minutes in. It was, as one upper-deck UNC fan put it, the “most enjoyable few minutes of Carolina basketball I’ve seen in at least five years.” Minutes later, another 12-2 run, the lead ballooning to 42-21. The Tar Heels made 14 of their first 21 shots and grabbed the offensive rebound on four of their seven misses. Four players — Bacot, Ingram, Davis and Ryan — scored in double figures.
“One of the better halves since I’ve been here, for 12 years as assistant and as a head coach,” Hubert Davis acknowledged. “It was pretty special.”
The flip side, then, is the second half wasn’t quite as good. For the third straight game, UNC allowed a 30-plus-point scorer; this time it was Dalton Knecht , dropping 37 points on 13-of-17 shooting, tied for the most points by an opponent in Dean Smith Center history. On the whole, Davis’ team was outscored by 14, didn’t score a single field goal over basically the last seven minutes — RJ Davis’ fadeaway 3 with 6:56 left, which pushed a shrinking seven-point lead back to 10, was North Carolina’s last made shot — and ... well, who cares? Not to be dismissive, but the fact the Tar Heels took their foot off the gas and still dropped 100 points and — despite a posterior clenching from the thousands in attendance — never let the game get back within seven?
“As far as a statement,” RJ Davis said, “I think it’s a big one.”
Considering this was only the second time Tennessee had allowed 100 points since 2006, yeah, you could say that. This was, without question, Hubert Davis’ best nonconference win as UNC’s head coach.
Or at least, for now.
Because beyond its electrifying offense Wednesday — Cadeau posting the first 10-assist game by a UNC freshman since current assistant coach Marcus Paige back in 2013; Davis scoring 27 points, one game after 30, without a single turnover; Bacot posting his first double-double, 22 points and 11 rebounds, since before that aforementioned Bahamas trip — you know the biggest thing North Carolina displayed Wednesday?
The ability to hang with any team in the country.
That’s something, if we’re being honest, you couldn’t have said around Chapel Hill very often of late.
Inevitably, there will be losses to come. Happens, just like it did in the Bahamas. And it will sting and poke at that nerve again because one high-profile win — or even a couple — does not heal years worth of unfulfilled expectations.
But with what it did Wednesday, North Carolina is firmly back in the national conversation. So what, other than the roof, is the ceiling for this squad?
“I think national championship,” Ingram said. “When everyone’s clicking, no one can beat us.”
(Top photo of Harrison Ingram and Elliot Cadeau: Bob Donnan / USA Today)
