Carolina found the second-half burst it so sorely missed at Pittsburgh last Friday.
The Tar Heels shot 60 percent in the final 20 minutes against Wake Forest Wednesday night, outscoring the Demon Deacons 51-41 in the second half to secure the 88-79 win.
Heels win.#CarolinaFamily | @WellsFargo pic.twitter.com/OxtyBSYqru
— Carolina Basketball (@UNC_Basketball) January 5, 2023
“Wake Forest is such a good basketball team,” UNC head coach Hubert Davis said afterward. “This was a really important game for us, and I just was really proud of them.”
The win is Carolina’s eighth straight at home against the Demon Deacons, a streak which dates back to the 2010-11 season. It also improves the Tar Heels to 7-0 at home this season, 10-5 overall and 2-2 in ACC play.
Leading the Tar Heels’ second-half barrage was junior guard R.J. Davis, who scored 22 points on 8-11 shooting in the final 20 minutes to end with 27. That total helped Davis reach 1,000 points for his career, the 81st Tar Heel to do so. Carolina has the most 1,000-point scorers of any program in the country.
“Coach Davis, he told me, ‘R.J., we’re gonna need you to step up and be the big-time player I know you are,'” Davis said. “I took that to heart. I came out and just did what I had to do.”
Though Davis was four points shy of setting a new career high, two of his teammates did just that: Leaky Black’s 18 points are the best in the fifth-year wing’s career, while freshman Seth Trimble’s 11 points were the most in his young career. Their stories were opposites: 14 of Black’s 18 came in the first half (on 3-4 shooting on three-pointers), while Trimble scored eight of his 11 in the second. Black finally eclipsed the 16-point barrier with a thunderous breakaway dunk with the game in hand in the final minute.
“I’m just trying to win,” Black said. “I didn’t really care about that, to be honest with you.”
Senior center Armando Bacot had a slightly different version of events.
“Leaky got a little mad at me at the end, because I took the ball,” Bacot said. “He wanted to get the ball and get to 20 points. But there’s a lot of basketball left to play. We’ll get him to 20 points.”
Bacot poured in 21 points of his own and grabbed nine rebounds, just missing what would’ve been his 58th career double-double. He sits three shy of tying UNC’s school record of 60, set by Hall of Famer Billy Cunningham. Bacot did make some history, though: his 5:0 assist-to-turnover ratio Friday night was the best in his decorated Carolina career.
Bacot often acted as the lone big man against the Demon Deacons, as graduate forward Pete Nance left after just two minutes with what the program reported as a stiff back. According to Nance’s teammates, the Northwestern transfer had been struggling with the injury during practices leading up to the game. No update was provided on Nance’s availability for Saturday’s game against Notre Dame.
Without Nance, Carolina’s defense struggled to stop the Demon Deacon offense early in the second half. Wake Forest had taken a one-point lead into halftime, then extended that lead to as large as six points with 13:48 remaining. But where the Tar Heels folded in the last game of 2022, they stood tall in the first game of 2023.
“One of the things that we’ve talked about is that for us to be successful, we’ve just got to dig deeper,” Hubert Davis said. “Find the joy in how hard it is to be the best that you can be individually and as a team… and our guys did that.”
“At times, we just get sloppy,” said Bacot, whose fiery comments after the Pittsburgh game no doubt resonated within the locker room. “And I think today we just stayed steady.”
Though Wake ended up shooting 55 percent in the second half, it could not keep up with the hot-shooting Tar Heels. UNC’s 88 points scored were its most in an ACC game since the 94-81 win in the regular-season finale at Duke last March. That late-season push came after a 22-point blowout at the hands of Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, another in a string of humiliating blowouts for Carolina. Playing in friendly confines certainly helps in avenging such a defeat, but perhaps Bacot said it best: in a season when it’s been shockingly rare, the Tar Heels stayed steady.
It’s hard to do in the ACC. Just look a few miles down the road.
Featured image via Todd Melet. For a full photo gallery of the game, click here.
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