For Carolina alumni and fans, the City of Brotherly Love will forever be the City of Caleb Love and his second-half knockout.
The Tar Heels’ sophomore guard remains the most infuriating and enthralling player perhaps in all of UNC hoops history.
And his Sweet 16 performance Friday night is the greatest example of why we sometimes curse and then cheer him all in the short span of a basketball game.
Love opened the scoring with his first shot, a long three-pointer against UCLA in Philadelphia. That is usually a good sign for the streak-shooting sensationalist. But it was his only basket of a first half when he missed his next eight shots, three of them three balls.
Eric Montross, on the Tar Heel Sports Network, verbalized what we all may have been thinking when he said, “The only good thing about being three points behind at the half is that we are only three points behind at the half.”
The 31-28 score represented UNC’s lowest one-half point total of the season.
Carolina was frustratingly bad against the clever and hot-shooting Bruins, who would have made the late John Wooden proud with their playmaking and getting the ball to the best shooters at the right spots. Considering the Heels shot 35 percent and missed 10 of 14 from the arc and played the last four minutes without foul-plagued R.J. Davis, our Baylor 30-point Rocky, a three-point deficit seemed damn lucky.
Fast forward to the last few minutes of a game that Carolina dangerously led for only 8:20 after falling behind midway through the first half, and we saw one of the greatest stretches of this, or any, season.
Despite ten lead changes, the Tar Heels still trailed 64-61 with 2:08 left on a layup by the Bruins’ Tyger Campbell. Love had already heated up and scored 19 points in the second half to keep Carolina within striking distance.
Within 38 seconds, he hit a bomb from right of the key and, after Armando Bacot assisted by saving the ball from going out of bounds, launched another from straight away to put his team ahead for good. Bacot’s tip-in and four free throws from Love and Davis capped off the dramatic 12-2 run and sealed UNC’s 15th win in the last 18 games, and the most important of all.
Love’s 27 points in the second half was one short of Charlie Scott’s still-legendary 28 to bail out the Tar Heels in the 1969 ACC championship game win over Duke, which in those provincial days was more important than the NCAA title.
Hubert Davis, whose almost magical mystery ride from under fire to four Coach of the Year ballots, insisted Love locked in by taking the ball to the basket for three layups before he got hot from outside. Kiddingly sometimes called Love’s “drives to nowhere,” he used a slick Euro step to avoid a UCLA defender for one of the baskets and found open lanes for the other two.
Not only one of the most spectacular, but also most timely, offensive explosions, Love came back from a hangdog first half to help Brady Manek’s jittery last 20 minutes. While he hit just 1-of-6 from behind the arc, Manek drained a big one to give Carolina a 61-60 lead and breathe more life into the rally.
Bacot picked up his third foul early in the second half but played smartly the rest of the way to finish with his 28th double-double of the season, tying him for the national lead in that category and leaving him one short of Tim Duncan’s ACC record of 29 in 1996-97. AB’s 15 boards led to an 43-28 rebounding advantage and 19-6 edge on second-chance points.
After the Heels went 0-3 from the foul line in the first half, they converted all nine of their chances in the second, including R.J. Davis’ important three after drawing a foul on a missed three-pointer. The big four scorers had 69 of the team’s 73 points in UNC’s sixth straight win over UCLA and 17th in a row over Pac-12 opponents. And let’s not forget Leaky Black, who was major in holding Bruins’ scorers Johnny Juzang and Jaime Jaquez to 10 of 31 from the floor.
Love’s 30 points is the third time a Tar Heel climbed to that plateau in an NCAA tourney game in Philly. Lennie Rosenbluth had 39 against Canisius in 1957, as did Al Wood against Virginia and Ralph Sampson at the 1981 Final Four.
So their first Elite Eight game since Roy Williams’ last championship season of 2017 will be a role reversal from what underdog Carolina has used as fuel since ruining Coach K’s last home game in early March. The opponent is Cinderella Saint Peter’s, the No. 15 seed from Jersey City that has about five guys wearing glass slippers. As the higher seed, No. 8 UNC will be wearing their home uniforms for the first time since routing Marquette in the opening round.
A win would duplicate Bill Guthridge’s 2000 team’s run to the Final Four from the eighth seed, beating No. 9 Missouri, top-seeded Stanford, Tennessee (4) and Tulsa (7).
And if the Tar Heels do reach New Orleans (site of Dean Smith’s first NCAA title 40 years ago) where Duke or Arkansas would be waiting, they will be back in their baby blue uniforms that have taken them on most of this improbably joyous journey.
And if it happens that way and results in Carolina’s first-ever NCAA tourney meeting with the Blue Devils, well, there will be an agonizingly long week to noodle that one.
Featured image via Todd Melet
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our biweekly newsletter.
Comments on Chapelboro are moderated according to our Community Guidelines