Lucas: Swarmed

By Adam Lucas

RALEIGH—Carolina played without Caleb Wilson and Henri Veesaar on Tuesday night in an 82-58 loss at NC State. The Tar Heels also played without the competitiveness needed to avoid their worst defeat to the Wolfpack since before man walked on the moon.

"I was disappointed with our overall fight," Hubert Davis said on the Tar Heel Sports Network.

That's essentially the entire story of Tuesday night's game. Carolina was depleted. And the remaining Tar Heels didn't play well enough or hard enough to push the Wolfpack. The visitors trailed by double figures for 26 minutes and never cut the lead into single digits in the second half. It's the first time since last season's loss at Clemson just over 52 weeks ago that Carolina faced a double-digit deficit for the entire second half.

Perhaps you can exempt Zayden High from this discussion, as he posted his first college double-double (13 points and 10 rebounds before fouling out). And Jarin Stevenson collected 13 points and nine rebounds in 35 minutes.

Otherwise, though, the rest of the Tar Heels are going to have a long film session when Carolina reassembles Thursday after Wednesday's NCAA-mandated off day. No one else involved, right down to the postgame column writer guy, had a positive evening.

NC State scored 82 points but it felt like the Pack could've scored whatever total it needed. Without Wilson or Veesaar to defend the rim, the Wolfpack continually isolated the team's best scorers and let them work one-on-one.

Carolina, meanwhile, gave in to the idea that the absence of the post duo meant they had to attack almost exclusively from the outside. The Tar Heels fired 33 of 60 field goal attempts from three-point range. This year's team is shooting 33.5 percent from three-point range, which means you might have expected them to make approximately 11.

But they made only five, connecting on just 15.2 percent of their three-point attempts. Just an average night from three-point range could have made this a more interesting game. Instead, the Heels trailed by double figures for the final 26 minutes of the contest.

"They just didn't feel us on the defensive end," Davis said on the THSN. "There wasn't a physical presence the whole game. From an offensive standpoint, we had a difficult time generating good shots outside of Jarin and Zayden. Against NC State, with this lineup, you have to knock down some perimeter jump shots and we didn't."

Davis said the Wolfpack "swarmed" his team defensively. It felt like it, and the Tar Heels appeared staggered from the very beginning. With the possible exception of High and Stevenson, State was consistently the more aggressive team.

That's a bitter reality in a series Carolina has controlled for decades. This team was built around Wilson and Veesaar, so maybe we shouldn't be surprised that it looked off the axis without that pair. But it was still jarring to watch the Wolfpack play and talk (not always in that order) at a level the Tar Heels couldn't or wouldn't match.

The immediate solution is to get healthy. But there will be more than that needed before Saturday's game at Syracuse.

"We're going to go to work," Davis said. "Thursday and Friday will be real. We've got to make sure that the next time we go out there we're playing better, and that is what we'll do."

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University of North Carolina Athletics

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Players Mentioned

Zayden High

Jarin Stevenson

Henri Veesaar

Caleb Wilson

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