One bad ending just became two bad losses.
Over the years, Roy Williams has been interviewed numerous times about the privilege of participating in the Carolina-Duke rivalry, the ballyhooed best of them all.
When asked about the pros and cons, however, he always uses an iteration of this rationale.
Because both schools get so amped up for the two regular-season games, which are played between the Super Bowl and the NBA playoffs, where college basketball takes center stage, you had better be careful of the next game on your schedule.
Of course, that is less risky if you win, which Duke proved by following up its dramatic comeback at the Smith Center with an impressive victory over tall, talented and deep Florida State on Monday. For Carolina, however, it was Ol Roy’s worst fears realized.
The Tar Heels look like they hadn’t recovered at Wake Forest last night from their demoralizing defeat to Duke. They fell behind by 18 points at halftime, 26 early in the second half and dropped into a last-place tie in the ACC with Miami that likely killed whatever postseason chances they had left.
Everything they did well Saturday night — except for Christian Keeling’s shooting — went away against a Wake team starting the game with a 3-10 record in the ACC. Now, it looks like a not-so-super Tuesday at the ACC tourney for both teams.
The Heels went from shooting 53 percent against Duke, a much better defensive team than Wake, to 33 percent against the Deacons. They missed a season-high 16 of 17 3-pointers. They had only 9 assists for the game, four in the first half.
Granted, this was a wounded team of the heart and mind and a banged-up one on the surface. Garrison Brooks, who snapped out of his free throw slump, began with a scratched cornea that required goggles and ended up with two stitches in his lower lip. Armando Bacot finished with a taped right wrist.
“You have to be careful,” Roy has warned, “that one loss doesn’t become two.”
Well, they weren’t nearly careful enough, and it did.
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Whose job/responsibility is it to get a team mentally right to play? To build a fire so that they want to compete and win?. To practice so that they don’t continue to get surprised? To develop game awareness to know when to foul, and when not to? He may be a HOF coach with almost 900 wins and thee NCAA championships, but given the talent that UNC typically has, you or I could have won as many games. I love Carolina, but we need a new basketball coach.
A ball hog is a derisive term for a player who handles the ball exclusively to the point of impairing the team. Despite not being a violation of the rules of basketball, “ball-hogging” is generally considered unacceptable playing behavior at all levels of basketball competition. The term is highly subjective, and any individual player might be considered a ball hog by some observers but not by others.
Ball-hogging usually involves excessive shooting of difficult shots, especially when other players are in advantageous positions. Ball hogs attempt to monopolize their play of the ball, frequently dribbling excessively and infrequently passing the ball to a teammate.[1] Ball-hogging tends to manifest itself statistically as an abnormally high percentage of team shot attempts by the ball hog and often low percentages of shot accuracy and assists. They also tend to have a very poor assist-to-turnover ratio, used as the main statistical indicator of how well a player “shares” the ball.
You need to follow a new team
You think that 2017 was even top 10 talent wise …
No all those guys bought into team ball ..
This team has the biggest ball hog i have ever seen and who does Roy have on the bench to replace him with
Francis is clearly hurting and we are lucky tongetb10 minutes out of him…who then ?
When you practice 2 to 3 days ..you think Roy is coaching the PG shoot 19 times a game
No one likes to play with a ball hog …
Even playing the 2 ..once he hot the ball …he kept it
Yiu have 3 or 4 guys playing primary secondary and motion offense and you have one Viet that frankly doesnt care ….
It’s the downside of having a guy with his own marketing team
The greatest coach on the planet cant coach a guy who wont listen