By R.L. Bynum
PALO ALTO, Calif. — The same plays kept coming, but North Carolina couldn’t stop them or make the adjustments to slow the onslaught of 3-pointers and layups.
The Cardinal came with horns sets and the team’s best shooting of the season against a power five school (57.1% from the floor and 3-point range), and the Tar Heels repeatedly got schooled on pick-and-rolls.
One or two more stops would have made the difference between a win and the 95–90 loss UNC suffered Wednesday night at Maples Pavilion.
A defense that has continued to regress against tougher ACC competition couldn’t get it done, with 61% of Stanford’s points coming from either 3-pointers (16 of 28) or layups (10).
Caleb Wilson, who scored a season-high 26 points on 11 of 26 shooting, clearly was frustrated after the game, talking about the Tar Heels’ inability to figure out how to stop the actions out of the horn sets.
“They ran the same play, pretty much every time down the court,” Wilson said. “[They] brought the three and the four up, came off the right side, and basically just played isolation basketball.”
Carolina couldn’t stay in front of dynamic Stanford freshman guard Ebuka Okorie, who set a Stanford freshman record with 36 points.
“I guess, at the end of the day, it’s just about being able to guard the ball,” Wilson said. “That’s really all I can say. They stuck to exactly what was working. They were in the same place over and over again. It wasn’t like they were doing anything special.”
Coach Hubert Davis didn’t want to address Wilson’s comments because he didn’t hear the context. But, earlier in his press conference, he pushed back on the suggestion that Stanford’s success repeatedly came from horns sets or variations of it.
“I would respectfully disagree with that,” Davis said. “It was coming from a number of different situations. They were scoring threes in transition; it was coming off of isolation. It was coming off of ball screens, late communication, closeouts, and in terms of rotations. And so whether it was running a consecutive play, they were getting different things.”
Stanford coach Kyle Smith made it tougher for the Tar Heels to adjust their defense against the horns sets by mixing it up and finding many ways to get Okorie the ball.
“Our offense is pretty simple,” Smith said. “I thought we had one of the best players in the gym tonight and we just disguised a lot of different ways to get him with the ball and try to get two on the ball with him. We disguised a lot of those horns a lot of different ways, where this guy had the ball and there’s a screen or two behind it.”
Stanford made it work by maintaining consistent ball movement and making the extra pass to open a perimeter shooter.
Henri Veesaar, who also scored 26 points, said there were reasons for UNC’s defensive breakdowns.
“We clearly have a lot of mistakes on defense,” he said, “just not communicating or not talking or not listening. We’ve got to be just aware, to have a lot more defensive awareness than we have right now.”
Defending ball screens was a consistent problem.
“We would double a ball screen, and then we have a wide open guy right next to him,” Veesaar said. “Just those little things. We can’t win that way.”
Wilson said the Tar Heels neede to figure out how to make Stanford miss, but they rarely did.
“When somebody has 36 points on us, and two other players had 20? Shit can’t happen,” Wilson said.
Carolina can only hope to figure out how to solve its ongoing defensive problems as it practices in Berkeley for two days ahead of the 4 p.m. ET Saturday game at Cal.
“Just go back, learn from this game, watch film on this game, and then concentrate on the next opponent and do whatever we can do to have the best defensive game there,” Veesaar said, “and just really change our identity as a team and show how physical we can be and how good we can be defensively, because I think that’s what coaches take pride in, and we’re not doing our job.”
Veesaar said the players know what they need to change and just need to do it.
“We’ve got to be more in the gaps. We got to do more helping. We got to just rotate better, be quicker out of it,” he said. “They did an incredible job of passing out. Then they got a lot of threes and just making the easy, simple plays. But we got a way better job with it being disruptive.”
Although the record is much better than it was this time last season, defensive play is much worse. That has to change for the Tar Heels, and quickly.
Photo courtesy of UNC Athletics Communications
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