Art Chansky’s Sports Notebook is presented by The Casual Pint. YOUR place for delicious pub food paired with local beer. Choose among 35 rotating taps and 200+ beers in the cooler.
The Tar Heels are on the road for the next month plus two weeks.
Win or lose tonight against 5th-ranked UConn at Madison Square Garden, UNC starts a prolonged period away from home interrupted only by a December 29 game against Charleston Southern, which just fired its 18-year head coach. Before Carolina plays its next conference home game against Syracuse 13 days into the new year, the Heels will follow the stern test against the defending national champion Huskies with other neutral site games vs. Kentucky in Atlanta (December 16) and Oklahoma in Charlotte four days later.
ACC play resumes on January 2 with trips to Pitt (currently 5-3), Clemson (7-0) and NC State (5-2). Hubert Davis’ third team is 7-1 (with that OT loss to Villanova in Nassau) and would like to be 10-2 when those 19 ACC games commence. If you’re counting, that is 42 days with only one game in the Smith Center against perhaps the weakest opponent on the entire schedule. The No. 9 Tar Heels still need to pad their 1-0 conference record to avoid NCAA bubble talk that began early last season and never stopped.
UConn lost its first game to Kansas last week and enters the estimated 9 p.m. game with the same 7-1 record as Carolina. All five starters average in double figures and the Huskies lost in Lawrence, Kansas, by shooting only 41 percent, which is well below their season average of 50.2 percent, 22nd in the nation (UNC is 127th, shooting 46 percent).
The big-at-every-position Huskies are coming off their first national championship under head coach Danny Hurley, the one-year-younger brother of former Duke star Bobby Hurley, now in his ninth season as head coach at Arizona State. UConn is easily the best team Carolina has faced to date.
For example, Armando Bacot will have to guard 7-foot-2, 280-pound sophomore Donovan Clingan, who averages 14 points and 6 rebounds per game.
UNC’s Davis has ties to New York and the Garden from his four seasons playing for the NBA Knicks, who selected him with the 20th pick in the 1992 draft. Originally, he wanted to go to Phoenix, where his late uncle Walter Davis was living at the time, or Boston to play with former Tar Heel teammate Rick Fox.
“The last place I wanted was New York,” Davis said Monday. “I watched the Knicks play the season before and thought they were some of the meanest guys and were going to break me in half. I was really nervous but it turned out that was the best team I could have played for. Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, John Starks, they were all great teammates, I wish I could have played my whole career up there. I still love New York.”
Featured image via Associated Press/Julia Nikhinson
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.
