CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The last North Carolina team to beat Virginia won a national title. That may be setting the bar a little high for this group, even if Saturday’s win showed off what the Tar Heels can be at their best.
At the least, they’re the second-best team in the ACC, as dubious an honor as that may be this season.
When North Carolina plays like this — focused on defense, with Armando Bacot and Caleb Love playing like the stars they can be — the ceiling may not be the roof, but it’s still pretty high.
“We haven’t done anything yet,” Love said. “This game is a big win for us. I’m proud of my team, proud of our coaches for putting us in this position. But there’s no let-up at all.”
It’s tough to reconcile the North Carolina team that can play like this against Virginia and Michigan and then seem to lose the plot entirely against Kentucky, or forget its identity at Notre Dame, when the Irish dictated both the style and pace of play. The Tar Heels did both to Virginia on Saturday — Virginia of all teams — on their way to an easy 74-58 win, the second-most points the Cavaliers have allowed this season.
If there is a common thread between those two performances — two of UNC’s three best of the season, analytically speaking, with the utter blowout of Boston College thrown in for good measure — it was the opposition’s lack of an inside presence to handle Bacot, who finished with 29 points and 21 rebounds. Michigan did have Hunter Dickinson, who got big-manned by Bacot into foul trouble and irrelevance. Virginia had nothing.
The uncommon thread is Love, master of the no-no-yes shot, sometimes infuriating and sometimes unstoppable. When he’s on like this, it not only opens up space for Bacot and Brady Manek, it creates a degree of unpredictability that confounds opposing defenses. They’re not bad shots if you can make them, and Love can. Saturday, he made three in a row at a critical moment as UNC took control.
Coaches talk a lot about offense flowing from defense, but the flow seems to be reversed for North Carolina, as it was under Roy Williams. That has not changed. So when those two are at their best, everything else starts to fall into place.
“When we play with energy, we can be a great team,” Bacot said. “It doesn’t matter who we play.”
Best of the rest
It’s beyond clear at this point that there’s a cavernous gap between Duke and the rest of the ACC, as big a gap as there has ever been in ACC history. What’s less clear is who’s next, and whether there’s a second tier of ACC teams, or just one big blob all the way down.
Louisville (at Florida State) and Miami (at Duke) came into Saturday with matching 4-0 records and chances to prove their bona fides that night, but to that point without beating anyone other than Wake Forest — which would otherwise be part of this conversation.
Analytically, Virginia Tech has a claim, but in real life the Hokies are 0-3 with a pair of home losses. Even if they turn things around — and they almost certainly will before Brooklyn — they have a lot of ground to make up. And maybe Notre Dame, showing signs of the team it was supposed to be, can make a run, but the Irish likewise have a long way to go.
Which leaves, for the moment, the Tar Heels and Cavaliers, two traditional powers playing far below their usual standards in a year when that still might be good enough for a silver medal. Virginia started slowly with losses to Navy and James Madison, part of the ACC’s list of basketball ignominy this season, but the Cavs are, or were, starting to show signs of being more of what the ACC has come to expect from them.
There’s Duke and there’s everyone else, and everything about Saturday felt like a January playoff for next-best status heading into the meat of the ACC season.
The Tar Heels left no doubt as to the answer.
