A locker room inside Charlotte’s Spectrum Center might seem like an odd place to see a fork in the road, but that’s exactly what the Tar Heels found when they trudged back inside following their 80-79 defeat to Clemson in the ACC Tournament quarterfinals Thursday night.
Because now, Carolina can’t afford to play flat-footed basketball for more than 30 minutes and expect another bite at the apple. Do that in their next game, and the Tar Heels’ season will be over. It’s the knife edge that makes this month so thrilling to basketball fans. Or if you were inside that UNC locker room, so sobering.
“We’ve got to come out the gate with that fight,” said freshman guard Derek Dixon, referring to Carolina’s desperate run in the final minutes Thursday. “It can’t waver. It can’t start slow, which we’ve been struggling with all year. But now it’s win or go home. We’ve got to bring it.”
UNC has now lost consecutive games for the first time since its disastrous trip to California in January, which saw the Tar Heels drop road games at Stanford and Cal. If this week’s conference tournament in Charlotte was any indication, neither the Cardinal nor the Bears will be joining Carolina in the NCAA Tournament next week. Just another ignominious note in what was the season’s undisputed low point.
“It comes with a mindset,” said Jarin Stevenson Thursday, describing what went wrong against the Tigers. “Pride. Energy. We’ve just got to have a sense of pride and get stops… we’ve got to be better.”
“It’s been two games in a row where the other team has found ‘it’ more than us,” said Seth Trimble. “And it’s been a bad result for us.”
UNC’s challenge will be to capture and recreate the team which somehow managed to score 38 points in the game’s final 12 minutes, rather than trot out the one which scored only 41 in the first 28. Desperation, and staring down the barrel of an embarrassing loss, can do that. Fortunately for UNC, a sense of urgency is written in the NCAA Tournament’s DNA. If the Tar Heels can’t find it next week, the tournament’s first round will be as far as they go for a second consecutive season.
That first-round game will be the final second chance available to this team, one which has experienced a roller coaster of emotions just in the past week. It was only seven days ago that Caleb Wilson was cleared for five-on-five drills in practice, seemingly paving the way for the freshman star’s long-awaited return. Then he dunked, something he’s done thousands of times in his charmed basketball career, and it fractured his right thumb. A bad break – literally – which has snowballed into a bad week for UNC.
“This is a horrendous feeling,” said Henri Veesaar. “Knowing that we let everybody down. We let ourselves down.”
Ever the optimist, Veesaar projected the team would have a “get better” week before its NCAA Tournament opener. From chilly Philadelphia to snowy Buffalo to sunny San Diego, the possible host sites’ climates are about as varied as UNC’s performances this season. And after Thursday night, it’s become frighteningly easy to forecast a sleepy 9 p.m. tip-off time on the banks of Lake Erie, with UNC playing against a plucky mid-major licking its chops at the sight of a vulnerable blue blood.
If Trimble has any say in the matter, though, it won’t end that way. Talk is cheap, especially after a loss, but the senior guard seemed determined to not let what happened Thursday in Charlotte follow the team to its next port of call.
“We just take pride in this thing,” he said. “I think if we really do this thing for each other in the next three weeks and we really fight and we really have something to play for, it can take us a long way.”
Featured image via Todd Melet
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‘This is a Horrendous Feeling’: UNC Men’s Basketball Faces Harsh Reality After ACC Tournament Exit Chapelboro.com.
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