Virginia’s defense may have been the more decorated unit, but it was Carolina’s defense which stole the show in Brooklyn Thursday night. The Tar Heels suffocated the Cavaliers all night in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals, helping Carolina ease into Friday’s semifinals.
𝐇𝐄𝐄𝐋𝐒 𝐖𝐈𝐍.#CarolinaFamily | @WellsFargo pic.twitter.com/xfTMUoCOmD
— Carolina Basketball (@UNC_Basketball) March 11, 2022
Carolina’s defense combined with historically poor Virginia offense in the first half. The Cavaliers shot just 5-27 in the opening period and scored only 13 points. That’s an all-time low for a first half in ACC Tournament play in the shot clock era.
“I feel like our physicality from the beginning, and our intensity, really just took them out of their flow,” said senior wing Leaky Black, who spent much of the night guarding Virginia’s shifty point guard Kihei Clark. “They’re a rhythm team, just the offense they run… it really made them struggle.”
The UNC offense wasn’t much better, but got a major boost from graduate forward Brady Manek, who outscored the Cavaliers himself with 19 points on 7-11 shooting in the first half. The Tar Heels led 33-13 at the break.
“He was in a nice rhythm in the first half,” head coach Hubert Davis said of Manek. “But he’s been in a pretty good rhythm the entire season. One of the things that I hope people are seeing, he’s not just a great three-point shooter. He’s a basketball player.”
Manek would finish with a team-high 21 points in his first ACC Tournament game. He was the only Tar Heel to score more than four points in the first half.
“I was just playing basketball,” Manek said. “Making shots, getting to an open spot. A lot of my shots don’t come from what I do, it’s from what everybody else does for me. And having guys on the floor that are also threats gets me more space, more time and more chances to be open.”
Carolina spread its offense out in the final 20 minutes, with Caleb Love and Armando Bacot each scoring eight points in the period. It was certainly a quieter day for Bacot than his 29-point, 22-rebound performance against the Cavaliers in Chapel Hill in January, but it was an historic one nonetheless. Unlike Virginia’s history, Bacot’s was of a positive nature: he scored 10 points and grabbed 11 rebounds to secure his 24th double-double of the season, which is a new single-season record for UNC. Bacot broke Brice Johnson’s record of 23, set during the 2015-16 season.
Armando Bacot now has the most double-doubles in a single-season in Carolina Basketball history 🙌 pic.twitter.com/jMQ2NF8mC8
— Carolina Basketball (@UNC_Basketball) March 11, 2022
Carolina led by as many as 24 points in the second half while cruising to the 63-43 win. It’s the first time they’ve beaten Virginia twice in one season since 2012. The 43 points allowed were also a season-low. But more importantly, it provided validation for the Tar Heels after Saturday’s emotional victory at Duke in the regular-season finale. Davis emphasized that point before the game, and now his team is riding a season-high six-game winning streak.
“[Saturday] was an emotional game. But it was just a game,” Davis said. “And our attention, and our focus, and our preparation and our practice from last Saturday has been squarely on the ACC Tournament… that’s where we are. We don’t look at things that are outside of our control, and we don’t look at things in the past.”
In a scheduling quirk, the Tar Heels were the last of the ACC’s 15 teams to play its first game in the tournament, thanks to playing the last quarterfinal and having a double-bye into Thursday night. It gave Carolina some down time in the Big Apple, but Black was eager to finally take the floor.
“We’ve just been anxious to, as Coach Davis said, validate our win from this past weekend,” he said. “We’ve definitely been watching some of the games. It’s been a crazy month so far.”
“A lot of naps for all of us,” Manek said.
Carolina will now go from its nap-filled, five-day layoff into a 24-hour turnaround for Friday night’s ACC semifinal, to be played against the No. 7 seed Virginia Tech. The Hokies beat No. 10 seed Clemson on a buzzer beater in Wednesday’s second round before upsetting No. 2 seed Notre Dame in the quarterfinals to reach the conference’s final four. It will be Carolina’s third meeting with Virginia Tech this season. The Tar Heels won both previous matchups.
“They’re just a very difficult team to match up with,” Davis said of the Hokies. “The two games that we played them, one in Chapel Hill, and the other one in Blacksburg, were highly-contested and very competitive. It’ll be another great matchup tomorrow night.”
Featured image via Todd Melet. For a photo gallery of the game, click here.
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