Hubert Davis says UNC has no choice but to respond following Pitt loss

The rollercoaster season for North Carolina continued Wednesday night in a stunning 76-67 home loss to Pitt. Understandably, First-year coach Hubert Davis was not happy, but explained that his team has no choice but to move forward with urgency if it wants to make the NCAA Tournament.

During his postgame press conference, visibly frustrated, Hubert Davis cut off a reporter to explain the urgency for North Carolina after the bad loss.

“Got no choice here. Yeah, sorry to cut you off. There’s just no choice. As I said before, you can sit here and whine and complain and point fingers and make excuses and continue to be down on yourself or you can show up the next day and get ready to compete and fight and get after it. And so that’s my expectation, that’s our job, and that’s what this team and this program will do.”

The game ended as a Quadrant 4 loss for North Carolina. But Pitt jumped from 179 to 159 in the NET rankings on Thursday morning, making it a Q3 loss for the Tar Heels. They remain on the bubble with dwindling chances to put a big win on the resume before the postseason.

Hubert Davis on fixing problems

After taking time to address the urgency of the situation, Hubert Davis went in-depth on the areas where North Carolina has struggled and can improve.

“Well, I’ve expressed to you guys and us as a team, it’s been clearly expressed and talked about, about what allows us to have success as a team. And we’ve identified that it’s made clear, and it’s been definitive. It’s been communicated — every day, a number of times — in terms of we’ve got to play defense. In the first half, Pitt shot 56% from the field, I think that’s the highest that they have shot in any half this year. We talked about rebounding the basketball, they outrebounded us in the first half. And then we talked about taking care of the basketball, and in the first half we had 10 turnovers and they actually had 20 points off of our 10 turnovers. So every turnover they were converting it into points.”

He continued: “And so if we’ve identified those three areas that we have to be good at in order to put ourselves in a position to compete and to be successful, and to not check all three of those boxes … In the second half we actually cut it to six with the ball — it’s hard to believe that we were even in that position with the way that we played, especially in the first half.”