Hubert Davis looks at big picture of North Carolina season after blowout loss vs. Duke

The North Carolina Tar Heels suffered an 87-70 point loss to rival Duke on Saturday. With that, head coach Hubert Davis saw his team fall to 13-10 in what has been a frustrating and disappointing season in Chapel Hill.

After the game, Davis admitted his team is frustrated. However, he also wants to make sure he’s looking at the big picture over the course of the season.

“Yeah, there’s frustration,” Hubert Davis said. “But I’ve told guys this and I specifically told them tonight the only thing that you have control over and anything is how you react and how you respond. I told them this is a great lesson in life. There are going to be speed bumps and traffic and wind and rain, and how do you react? How do you respond when it’s a sunny day and when it’s a windy day?”

Turnovers ended up being costly for North Carolina, who coughed up the ball 14 times in the loss to Duke. It also didn’t help that the Blue Devils shot the ball well, making 10 of 20 three-point shot attempts on the game.

The loss to Duke was the second loss in a row for North Carolina and their fourth loss in the last five games for the Tar Heels. That’s left them at 6-5 in ACC play or seventh in the current conference standings.

“And so the thing that I have been proud of this team is its fight. It stays connected, it stays together. It competitively continues to move forward, and my expectation is for us to continue to move forward. We don’t play for another week,” Davis said. “So, this is a great week for us to regroup, to come together as a team, to practice moving forward towards the stretch.”

Hubert Davis and North Carolina don’t have a midweek game before returning home to take on the Pittsburgh Panthers. That will be a rematch of a game that North Carolina lost by eight points in late January.

Hubert Davis addresses what went wrong early vs. Duke

North Carolina fell into a hole early that it couldn’t climb out of against Duke. It was an issue that Hubert Davis went on to address after the game.

“Our unforced turnovers, something that we’ve got a problem with, is just turning the ball over. We’ve talked at great length about how important it is to take care of the ball in two ways. One, obviously unforced turnovers and shot selection, and our live ball turnovers are turning into pick-six plays for the opponent. So giving teams, just for example, tonight (Duke) got 19 points off of 14 turnovers,” Davis said.

“Against good teams, that’s just not going to work, and so we just got to do a better job and take care of the basketball. But at the beginning of the game, that was the one key that got us in a hole early at the beginning of the game.”