Here was the season-salvaging opportunity the North Carolina Tar Heels needed, right in front of them, so close they could snatch it: The best player in college basketball, Cooper Flagg of the Duke Blue Devils, was starting the second half with three fouls in a roaring Dean Dome.
Carolina went from a point down at halftime to seven points up, 56–49. But the one thing the Heels didn’t do for the longest time after intermission was to go at Flagg at all. They didn’t drive on him. They didn’t put him in pick-and-roll situations. They certainly didn’t post him up (a lost art that must wound former coach Roy Williams’s soul). They just let Flagg lurk off the ball, no chance of picking up a fourth foul.
And when Carolina’s guards hoisted too many difficult shots that stopped falling, Duke got back into gear. The opportunity was gone.
In a 6½-minute stretch, the Devils outscored their bitter rivals 16–3. Carolina’s moment passed. Flagg went back to playing with dominant assertiveness at both ends of the floor, racking up 10 second-half points, seven rebounds, five assists and four blocks. Duke won going away, 82–69, and now North Carolina heads to the ACC tournament in need of a massive run to make the NCAA tourney.
Anything short of reaching the final game in Charlotte won’t be enough. And even then, depending on what’s happening elsewhere, the Heels might need to win four games in four days and cut down the nets to assure themselves of an NCAA bid. Their résumé consists of a neutral-court win over the UCLA Bruins before Christmas, and a 13–7 mark in a historically weak ACC.
The Heels needed this one badly. They gave themselves a chance. And then they failed to take advantage.
Duke is the better team—arguably the best team in the nation. When the Devils get rolling, they’re a freight train. But they weren’t rolling for a long stretch Saturday night, and the conductor of the train, Flagg, was simply trying to keep himself on the floor after missing 11 minutes of the first half.
Carolina obliged. He went the full 20 after halftime, regaining assertiveness as time went by.
I asked the 18-year-old future No. 1 NBA draft pick if he was surprised Carolina didn’t attack him in the second half. His answer: “I mean, a little bit for sure. I think that would’ve been smart for sure. I mean, I think we did a good job of keeping our matchups and just playing solid defense.”
Hubert Davis, the feast-or-famine coach of the Tar Heels, said trying to draw a fourth foul on Flagg wasn’t part of the second-half plan at all.
“We weren’t specifically trying to get a fourth foul on him,” he said. “For us to be successful we have to attack the paint and try to dominate points in the paint through post penetration and offensive rebounding. We didn’t do as good a job offensive rebounding today when we got into the lane. That’s where we generate drawing defenders then being able to pass it out and shoot wide-open threes, we weren’t able to do that. They’re long, they’re athletic and I think that really bothered us.”
A lot of things have been bothering North Carolina in this disappointing season. The Heels haven’t been very good defensively. Their best player, fifth-year senior RJ Davis, hasn’t been as consistently excellent as he was last season, shooting 7% worse from three-point range. The other seven members of the Heels’ rotation are bereft of alpha dogs—they are good players, not great. The overall talent level at Carolina is below championship level.
And so it seems likely that North Carolina will miss the NCAAs for the second time in Hubert Davis’s four seasons. That isn’t supposed to happen here, and it has some Tar Heels fans wondering whether Davis is the guy who can return them to the lofty levels attained by Williams and Dean Smith.
When the news came out recently that Davis’s contract had been quietly extended by two years last summer, it wasn’t well-received by a significant portion of the UNC faithful. They all love the former standout player, but they’re not all in love with his coaching.
Davis has had some incredible high points. He guided Carolina to a 29–8 record, ACC regular-season title and No. 1 NCAA seed last year. And in 2022, he handed Mike Krzyzewski two crushing losses in the final season of his fabled career—the first one in his Cameron Indoor Stadium farewell, and the second in the Final Four. Those have to rank as North Carolina’s sweetest victories of all-time in this rivalry.
But here’s the flip side: That 2022 Carolina team was 22–8 and on the bubble before the breakthrough win at Cameron. The ’23 Carolina team went from preseason No. 1 to missing the NCAAs. And this season’s team has plummeted from the preseason top 10 to the fifth seed in the ACC tourney.
“I think it’s most important to focus on what is real, and what is real is the game in front of you,” Davis said. “We play on Wednesday [against the winner of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish–Pittsburgh Panthers first-round game] and our job and our responsibility is whomever we play to be prepared to play our best game on Wednesday. And if we play well enough and we get to play on Thursday, then our preparation will be focused on that.”
A win over either the Irish or the Panthers won’t move the NCAA needle at all. Neither would a potential quarterfinal victory over the Wake Forest Demon Deacons, a fellow bubble dweller. North Carolina would need a semifinal win over this same Duke team to get into the at-large mix.
The Devils have now beaten the Heels twice this season by an average of 15 points. Carolina has led for a total of seven minutes and 13 seconds in those games. It will take a superlative effort to turn the tables in a third meeting—if there is a third meeting.
That’s why the missed opportunity Saturday night looms so large. It was the signature win North Carolina needed. It had home court advantage. It had the best player in college hoops in foul trouble. And the Heels let it get away.
The price of squandering the moment may be steep.
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