UNC get Orange crushed in the second half
The look we didn't want to see
Under the spotlight that is the mecca of basketball, Madison Square Garden, we all knew that this year’s team was going to show us what they had right now. The first half showed positive signs as it ended with the Tar Heels up by 2 on the Orange, 39 to 37. But right after the intermission Syracuse (4-0) went on a 20 to 1 run and it was 57 to 40 before Carolina (4-1) could get out of the shock it had just been handed. At the end the game went to SU by the score of 87 to 71. Taking nothing away from the Orange in this game, they won this game easily and handly, on the Heels’ side there are some positives to be cherished as well. And of course, without saying, there are things that need to be fixed.
The positive I want to focus on is that such a young team, that was steamrolled at the beginning of the second half, did not give up on the game (and themselves) and brought the game back to single digits before the Orange pushed it back up to the teens. While you might think I am trying to find a fake silver lining in this game I am not, to me this is important, young players must not give up in order to improve in the future. To tell you how bad the first ten minutes of this second half was the announcers brought back “the Kansas games” where the Jayhawks went up 40 to 12 on the Heels. That time frame was so hard to watch, missed shots that should be “gimme’s”, even worst getting beaten on the boards, something that should be the strength of this squad, and anything/everything that could go wrong did. But the players stuck it out and were able to snap out of the funk and make the second 10 minutes of the second half a decent showing.
“Two air balls on our first two shots and then two turnovers. Our first four possessions of the second half we don’t even hit the rim,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “We didn’t have an answer for guarding Wes and it was the snowball effect from there. It’s frustrating no question about that. We’ve got to play better and they’re good.”
One of mySU blogger friends, Sean from Troy Nunes is an absolute Magician, sent me this tweet before the game:
He is definitely a magician, since Johnson got the tournament MVP and did a lot of damage to us on Friday. On the other hand I told him about Ginyard and somehow, while the fifth senior had a decent game, he could not stop the best scorer on the court.
I watched this game live, then twice on DVR, because I wanted to see what this team needs the most. In the end I could sit here and say “this guy needs this, that guy needs that”, but the reality is that this team needs to practice and gel in order to become one unit and not five players on the court. I think that head coach Roy Williams’ quote about the game makes a lot of sense and proves that thsi team needs to work more and more:
“It’s frustrating; there’s no question about that. But we’ve got to play better. It’s not the way we wanted to play, to say the least. We thought we needed to do a great job on the backboards [and] we thought we needed to do a great job on our movement on offense against their zone and we didn’t do a great job on either one of them.”
Again, taking nothing away from Syracuse, I would love to see the match up of these two programs in March, since I believe that the Orange are playing as well as they could and the Tar Heels will be a lot better by then. But for now this squad needs to work hard to get better, starting with the turnovers, to all the other smaller problems, the coaching staff has its work cut out for them. They do not have much time to work on it either as the Heels face a couple of opponents (beginning with Gardner-Webb tomorrow tonight) before hosting Michigan State in a rematch of last year’s national title game.
