I had said in my preview between arc rivals that one thing that the Heels needed to do is not let the Blue Devils’ role players become super stars. Unfortunately that is what happened, mixed in with the fact that UNC could not score again, and that led to #1 North Carolina (26-7) losing big to #2 Duke (30-4) by the final of 75 tp 58. This ends the ACC post season tournament and hopefully the bad stretch that head coach Roy Williams’ squad is going through. I had predicted a Duke victory, but I didn’t predict it this bad for UNC. Unfortunately with the top players for the Heels not clicking, Zeller being the exception, that is what happened in the final game in Greensboro.
“They were overall more aggressive,” UNC’s Tyler Zeller said. “The refs let us play. I don’t think we adapted to it as well as they did.”
That’s basically what happened in the game, Duke took it to UNC and UNC could not take it back to them. With some bad calls on both sides, that might have gone against UNC a bit more, the game was just not one that the Tar Heels could come back from digging themselves into a hole.
Probably the Heel that had the worst of this game was point guard Kendall Marshall, who could just not shake the tenacity of Duke’s Nolan Smith on both sides of the ball. The young floor general had four assists to five TOs. Even the super frosh Harrison Barnes found his kryptonite this afternoon and had what could be called a decent game. Unfortunately we all know that when you play against your arc rivals mediocracy is going not going to lead you to a W. In the end Tyler Zeller and John Henson (at times) did what they could, but both seemed frustrated by the physical game that the Blue Devils came in with.
Carolina has to now focus all of its energy on next week and forget all of this that has happened, but on that more in my next post tomorrow. For now let me finish with the game at hand. As I watched the game once again I saw comments on tweeter saying how Roy Williams is not a good head coach and his players bail him out all the time. I totally disagree with all of that, he can do many things, but he can not avoid his players from missing shots and from them being a bit less (or a lot more) aggressive than Duke was.
We are spoiled as fans, but we can not be any luckier than what we are with the coaching staff and the players we have. This coach, who someone have doubted, brought a team back from NIT, losing three players, and are now a second seed in the Big Dance. That isn’t luck, that is talent. A win today could have had this squad as the one seed in place of, you guessed it, Duke. We lost this game, we did it in a bad way, nothing can be denied about this, but let’s stop it with the “Williams can’t win” or that he “inherited a great program”, because the first isn’t true and the second he did, but it was on a bad down swing. Let’s remember this, the seniors that won the National Championship for our coach were freshmen going 8-20 a few years earlier.
As I have said many times, this rivalry is a lot more than just 40 minutes of playing time, and so while this one burns and burns hard, it is but one more piece of the puzzle. And who knows, there might just be another one added before the end of the season, and then we could just see Rivalry, Take 4!
Original Story:
http://www.the5thcorner.com/it-was-no...
