By Adam Lucas
CHARLOTTESVILLE—At a place where Virginia used to thrive on making it impossible to run, Carolina changed Saturday’s game by pushing the tempo.
The Tar Heels had already chiseled into the Cavaliers’ 16-point first half lead with what seemed like an innocuous 7-0 spurt at the end of the first half. In that 92-second sequence, Seth Trimble made a free throw and then Luka Bogavac and Derek Dixon made back-to-back three-pointers.
At that point, it felt inconsequential. After all, the Wahoos completely dominated the backboards in the first 20 minutes, owning a 26-16 overall advantage and collecting 14 second chance points off nine offensive rebounds.
Caleb Wilson and Henri Veesaar combined for only one rebound. Veesaar shot just 2-for-7. The Cavaliers were 10-0 at home. All those numbers, however, camouflaged the fact that the Carolina starters played Virginia fairly evenly. The deficit was largely the product of a poor stretch with substitutes on the floor, and the 7-0 run allowed the Heels to go to the locker room with some positive momentum.
“That was huge,” Hubert Davis said on the Tar Heel Sports Network. “That gave us some confidence.”
“The end of the first half,” Virginia head coach Ryan Odom said, “was a killer.”
At the moment, it felt more like a temporary relief from the onslaught of offensive rebounds. But then Carolina found an unexpected way to prevent those second shots—they never allowed the first one.
For most of the season, the Tar Heel defense has struggled to produce turnovers. Entering the day, they were next to last in the league in defensive turnover percentage, and they were in the bottom 20 nationally in that category.
But the Cavaliers had quietly been a little sloppy with the ball in ACC play, and the Heels used that carelessness to ignite the offense. First it was Caleb Wilson reaching in to swipe the ball away from Sam Lewis. Jaydon Young picked up the loose ball, found Derek Dixon near midcourt, and then Dixon looped it back to Wilson for a dunk.
The play prompted an Odom timeout, but it was only the beginning of Carolina’s turnover efficiency. Over the next three minutes, Virginia turnovers produced a pair of free throws from Wilson and a Bogavac jumper, and suddenly the Tar Heel offense looked much more potent.
“We’ve not a team that forces a lot of turnovers,” Davis said. “But we got steals, deflections, and that allowed us to get into the open court. The way we transitioned from defense to offense was real. Jarin and Caleb did exactly what we asked them to do: run down the middle of the floor. The pitch-aheads and the awareness by our guards to see their open teammates got us back into the game and gave us a lot of energy.”
Dixon helped cultivate a highly opportunistic offense (Carolina led points off turnovers 19-2, and the edge was 14-2 in the second half) that was suddenly looking to run not just off turnovers, but also missed field goals—and even made field goals, the long-time sure sign of a Tar Heel transition game that is humming.
Wilson scored six seconds after a Jacari White basket thanks to a gorgeous hit-ahead from Dixon. Jarin Stevenson converted a layup four seconds after a Jonathan Powell defensive rebound. Dixon lofted another perfect hit-ahead, this time to Stevenson, who swished a couple of free throws seven seconds after a Virginia miss.
As impossible as it seems to believe now, in the aftermath of one of his best games as a Tar Heel, that Stevenson layup with 12:42 left represented his first points of the game. He went on to score a season-high 17, including a clutch old-fashioned three-point play with 2:51 remaining that gave Carolina a one-point lead and a back-breaking three-pointer with 1:38 left that pushed the lead to seven.
It all started with consciously playing the game on the move, and it led to a whopping points per possession figure in the second half near 1.6. Ken Pomeroy’s stats say Carolina’s two most efficient offensive games against top-100 opponents have been the last two games—wins over Notre Dame and Virginia.
“A big thing is always running hard,” Stevenson said on the THSN. “You have to get down the floor. If you beat them down the floor you get easy looks. And when you get fouled, you have to make the free throws, too.”
