North Carolina faces rival No. 2 Duke low on time to help tourney bid
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (AP) — RJ Davis can take comfort that he's been here before.
It was nearly three years ago that his North Carolina team looked uncertain of earning an NCAA Tournament bid as the Tar Heels prepared to visit rival Duke in the homecourt farewell for retiring Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski.
In a surprise, the Tar Heels won. In a bigger surprise, it catapulted them into a wild ride to the NCAA title game, complete with beating the Blue Devils again in the Final Four to end Coach K's career.
And now, as Davis is in his fifth and final year, the Tar Heels are hoping to find some similar elixir through Saturday's renewal of a blueblood rivalry. That comes with the second-ranked Blue Devils humming along and looking every bit like an NCAA title favorite, while the Tar Heels look iffy to crack the 68-team field.
“Going into that game in 2022, our backs were against the wall, people didn't really believe in us, but we believed in ourselves,” Davis said. “And that's what got us over the hump, that's what allowed us to make that run. And that's the same way of how I feel about this team right now."
Maybe so, but the Tar Heels (13-9, 6-4 Atlantic Coast Conference) have to get moving quickly.
They opened the year at No. 9 in the AP Top 25 poll with Davis as the country's lone returning first-team Associated Press All-American. But they were unranked by mid-December, with losses to a who's who of the nation's top teams: current No. 1 Auburn, No. 4 Alabama, No. 5 Florida, No. 7 Michigan State and No. 11 Kansas, among them.
They've shown stretches of high-level play, yet fail to sustain it. They enter Saturday having lost three of four, including one-point losses to Stanford and Wake Forest. The lone win came in surviving at home in overtime against a Boston College team with one league win.
“I mean, you change one possession in (some) of their games, their record looks a lot different,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “So the respect level we have for them is as high as it can be.”
And yet, the Tar Heels enter February at risk of missing the NCAAs for the second time in three seasons in another wild swing in Hubert Davis' four-year coaching tenure, coming a year after UNC won the ACC outright regular-season title and earned a No. 1 NCAA seed.
“I think the challenge in that is to face this challenge with positivity,” RJ Davis said. “I think that’s how my approach is going to be with this team. Yes, we’ve lost three out of the four. OK, cool, but how are we going to respond?”
The pressing challenge is matching up with the bigger Blue Devils (18-2, 10-0), who have the nation's longest winning streak at 14 games and a contender for national player of the year in 6-foot-9 star freshman Cooper Flagg.
Of particular concern: UNC has struggled for any consistent post play with the departure of five-year big man Armando Bacot, leaving the offensive burden largely on an undersized perimeter and a defense struggling against top big men.
For example, top scorers Davis (17.6), freshman Ian Jackson (14.7) junior Seth Trimble (12.3) and sophomore point guard Elliot Cadeau (10.7) are all 6-4 or shorter. Meanwhile, the transfer-portal addition to help with perimeter size and shooting, 6-7 wing Cade Tyson from Belmont, has struggled and is barely playing.
That adds up to a glaring concern against Duke, with every player in its primary rotation standing 6-5 or taller.
“They're athletic, they're long, they can cover a lot of space. ... They also have the ability to switch everything,” Hubert Davis said. "When teams do that, just like Pitt did us in the second half (Tuesday), your spacing, your ball and player movement has to be on point. You have to find advantages and be able to take advantage of those mismatches.”
But there's a larger problem beyond Saturday.
The Tar Heels hold a 1-8 record in Quadrant 1 games that top a postseason resume, the lone win coming in New York against UCLA shortly before Christmas.
The Duke game is the second of four straight games that could end up as Quadrant 1s, including Feb. 8 at home against Pittsburgh (No. 33 NET, currently a Quadrant 2 chance) and a visit to Clemson (No. 30) two days later.
After that, though, is a stretch of games that highlights how the ACC's woeful showing in nonconference play could hinder its hopes of getting more bids to match its steady run of March Madness success.
The Tar Heels won't be able to count on much of a lift from six games against teams with an average NET ranking of 145.5, with only Florida State (82nd) inside the top 100, before getting a second shot at the Blue Devils at home. That means the Tar Heels' opportunities to secure course-altering wins are dwindling.
In a look at BracketMatrix — a site that compiles tournament-field projections — the Tar Heels are an 11-seed while appearing in 48 of 84 mock brackets as of Friday afternoon.
“We trust coach, we trust each other," Jackson said. “And we believe in the work that we put in. We know what we do, we know what we work on, so just go out there and do it.”
___
Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here. AP college basketball: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-basketball-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-basketball