Hubert Davis stresses importance of North Carolina caring more

North Carolina continues to battle to keep their NCAA Tournament hopes alive, defeating Notre Dame 63-59 on the road Wednesday night. The Tar Heels found themselves down eight points at halftime, and apparently, head coach Hubert Davis’ halftime message had nothing to do with the game plan, just about the effort and care of his players.

“To get technical in terms of basketball, if you don’t get the energy, effort, and passion part you can’t get to that, it doesn’t make it,” Davis explained. “So until you check that box then you can get to the technical part. And so first half we coached effort and passion, and the second half we coached basketball.”

The Tar Heels ramped it up in the second half, outscoring Notre Dame 44-32 in the closing act. The Irish capitalized on the mistakes of North Carolina at first, but the Tar Heels cleaned up their brand of basketball and locked up on defense in order to come out on top of a second half that consisted of nine lead changes.

“I thought it was, Notre Dame is an unbelievable team, those guys are so good and they make you pay for your mistakes. And so in the first half, they scored 14 points off of our mistakes like going underneath screens when we weren’t supposed to, switching out of bounds underneath when we weren’t supposed to. But I do, in the second half I thought the guys really stepped up defensively,” Davis said.

The Tar Heels dominated the glass, outrebounding Notre Dame 52-33. Both Armando Bacot and Pete Nance ended the night with double-doubles, helping UNC secure their first win from being down at halftime since they defeated Wake Forest on January 4.

“We’ve been in this position a number of times in the last two weeks, we just have,” Davis said. “We’ve been in the same position at Pitt, the same position at Duke, the same position with, not against Wake Forest, but against Miami and also against NC State. And this time we were able to get the stops and make the baskets that we needed to down the stretch to win.”

With three games remaining in the regular season, the Tar Heels will have to play near perfect to keep their tournament hopes alive. But their journey does not start easy, as they face No. 6 Virginia at home in their next matchup on Saturday.