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Chapel Hill, NC- This game featured two teams with drastically different expectations entering the season. The visiting La Salle Explorers were predicted to finish 15th in the Atlantic 10, while North Carolina was predicted to finish 2nd in the ACC. Neither team entered this matchup playing their best game, but North Carolina rallied behind the home crowd's energy—that wasn't fueled by the team on the court.
New head football coach Bill Belichick was introduced at halftime, and the home crowd's cheers equaled those of Cade Tyson's 5 three-pointers in this game. The product on the floor for North Carolina was also worth cheering for.
La Salle has been without one of their best players the entire season entering this game. Eric Acker checked into the game at the 13:41 mark in the first half and once he settled in and got going in the second half, he looked like the elite shifty scoring guard he was at Long Island last season. The Explorers that kept the game competitive in the first half were Forward Demetrius Lilley and Guard Deuce Jones. Unfortunately for La Salle, once the Tar Heels frontcourt got into a groove, North Carolina held control of the lead and never let up.
The frontcourt has been one of the consistent factors contributing to the Tar Heel's lack of success early on this season. Four losses through the first ten is a somewhat rare occasion for North Carolina and certainly not what Tar Heel fans had hoped for in RJ Davis's final season with the program. The Tar Heels made it a focal point to score inside in this game. They finished with 50 points in the paint and Head Coach Hubert Davis was asked about their performance in this area:
"It was great. It's been an emphasis for us. It felt like we were missing opportunites to get our bigs the ball close to the basket...I say to the team all the time, I want to dominant points in the paint through post and penetration and until today we hadn't really looked at the post and it's something we are going to do even more..."
The guy that was the biggest difference maker for North Carolina was Cade Tyson. He finished the contest with 23 points, 5 rebounds, 2 steals, and 1 block on 9-14 from the field and 5-10 from three. A big reason for his success was due to the spacing that the inside scoring for Carolina opened up on the perimeter. Tyson has not had a great start to the season as this was just the second time he has scored in double-figures in a Tar Heel uniform. He was brought in to fill a role extremely similar to that of Brady Manek, who was vital to the Tar Heels run to the national championship game in 2022. If the Tar Heels are going to reach their ceiling, they are going to need Tyson to be the confident shooter and scorer that he can be.
In the Maui Invitational, North Carolina finished 1-2 with their lone win coming by two points against Dayton, 92-90. They followed their trip to Maui with a home loss to Alabama 94-79 in the ACC/SEC challenge. In their last outing, they narrowly defeated Georgia Tech 68-65. Some of the Tar Heel players felt this was a reset game. Hubert Davis said after this win over La Salle that the players responded well to him "turning up the level of me" in practice leading up to this game.
The Tar Heels will need to continue playing with this kind of energy if they want to have a better four-game stretch coming up than they did in their previous four. Their next four are against Florida, UCLA, Campbell, and Louisville. As for La Salle, they have games against Fairleigh Dickinson and a non-Division I opponent before they open up Atlantic 10 play at Dayton on New Year's Eve.
Follow along on X (@TrevorEverette) for live game updates, and for more of my work on House of College Hoops and House Enterprise, head here.
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