UNC Basketball’s season ends with yet another frustrating loss. What now?
2022-23 season in review
Last year’s team did nothing to dispel us of the notion that March is made for Tar Heels, even when the regular season doesn’t go to plan. As fans, we assumed redemption would be ours this year, just like it was in 2017. The 2016 team lost its two best players, Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson, and somehow won the title the following year. That’s because everyone else improved. Joel Berry stepped up and became the team’s best leader. Justin Jackson blossomed into the ACC Player of the Year. Luke Maye went from a little-used bench player to a guy entrusted with the final shot to beat Kentucky in the Elite Eight. The list goes on and on.
This year’s team featured no such growth, and it’s hard to figure out why. Were they scarred from losing that big lead to Kansas in the national title game? You would think a year would be long enough to get over that. Were they complacent, assuming that just showing up would be enough to hang another banner? Even if that was true at the outset of the season, at some point after so many losses and blown leads, it would have to sink in that the name on the jersey wasn’t enough to get it done. My belief, and I mean no disparagement to anyone on the team when I say this, is that last year’s team was just OK for much of the year, then they put together one of the all-time hot streaks at precisely the right time, which just happened to coincide with Brady Manek getting more minutes.
Look at Carolina’s NCAA Tournament games and it’s clear. After blowing the doors off Shaka Smart and Marquette, which was seriously impressive, the Heels were well on their way to destroying defending champion Baylor until, you guessed it, Manek got ejected. The rest of the team nearly suffered a historic collapse before somehow salvaging it in overtime. With Manek back for the Sweet Sixteen, they played a fantastic game to outlast a UCLA team that could have gone all the way. They then beat a Cinderella St. Peter’s group that was in over its head, before once again toppling Duke, possibly by New Orleans voodoo or a deal with the Devil. Neither of which I’m opposed to, by the way.
Manek spent this year playing professionally in Australia, but the rest of the team didn’t pick up the slack like the 2017 Heels did after Marcus and Brice left. Nowhere was this more visible than in crunch time. Carolina hit so many big shots to close out games last year, but this year they were always the lesser team in the second half. I can’t remember a single clutch shot from Caleb this year, even though it seemed he spent all season trying to replicate the daggers from last March.
Even without inheriting last year’s clutch gene, there’s so much this team kept doing wrong to lose games. Outside of a few late-season games, the three-point shooting was abysmal. Manek’s absence was glaring, but nobody could be counted on to consistently hit shots.
Turnovers were killer. The overall numbers weren’t obviously terrible, but every game seemed to feature five or six brutal giveaways at exactly the wrong time, and they always seemed to lead to an easy basket.
Speaking of easy baskets, this team rarely got any. We’ve spent our lives watching Carolina run up and down the court, but this group seemed content to walk it up the floor and grind it out in the halfcourt, something they weren’t particularly proficient at anyway. With both RJ Davis and Caleb Love, the team’s unwillingness to get out and run has baffled me all season long.
Another hallmark of Carolina basketball has been rebounding. Sure, Armando put up record numbers, but rebounding at Carolina has always been a team effort. UNC ranked 25th in the country in rebounding rate, which is good, but not at the top five levels we’ve been used to. When nothing else was going right, this dropoff became even more glaring.
Nobody can say that this team lacked talent. All of the young guys on the bench were top recruits. NBA scouts were showing up to watch Jalen Washington, and he could barely get off the bench. I think the track record of the Iron Five last year became a bit of a curse. Hubert Davis saw the success he had by playing five guys big minutes and thought he could rely on that going forward.
It’s not a sustainable way to play. The season is long, and guys wear down not only over the course of months, but from the beginning to the end of games. There’s no reason not to give more minutes to all the talented guys on the bench, especially early in the year when you need to evaluate everyone. I hope that this year will have made that clear, and going forward we’ll see a team that utilizes its talent in a better way.