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Carolina is Wobbling After Three Straight Losses

by
Dick Weiss
December 2, 2022

With North Carolina returning four of five starters from a team that beat Duke twice, advanced to the national championship game and had a 15 point lead over eventually champion Kansas before collapsing from exhaustion in the championship game, it was an easy choice for the media to select the Tar Heels as a pre-season No. 1.

But nothing lasts forever.

Carollna has come back to earth with a thud, losing three straight games- to Iowa State, Alabama and Indiana– in the first month of the season. The Heels have slipped to 18th in this week’s AP poll.

The Tar Heels are struggling at both ends of the floor. Sophomore guard Caleb Love, who lit up March madness and Peter Nance, a transfer foward from Northwestern, are shooting a combined 29 percent from three. the combination of Armando Bacot and Nance has not clicked and the Heels’ defense is allowing teams to shoot 35 percent from the three, as composed to 27 percent in six games in March, Unbeaten Indiana magnified Carolina’s problems during a 12 point victory in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge showdown at Bloomington, scoring 50 points in the paint and shooting 57 percent inside the arc.

No one at the Smith Center is panicking. Yet.

But it’s obvious Hubert Davis needs to fix the Heels’ offensive problems and create more balance and discipline on the floor without depending on Love and guard RJ Davis to take more than half the team’s shots in the three losses..It’s one thing to play an NBA style, another for a team to shoot 30 percent from the three.

Carolina will likely be a top 4 seed in March, but they are hardly invincible in a league where Virginia, Miami and Virginia Tech are all better than expected. And Duke is still Duke..

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Dick Weiss

Dick Weiss is a sportswriter and columnist who has covered college football and college and professional basketball for the Philadelphia Daily News and the New York Daily News. He has received the Curt Gowdy Award from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and is a member of the national Sportswriters Hall of Fame. He has also co-written several books with Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Dick Vitale and authored a tribute book on Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski.

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