Behind Armando Bacot, comeback-hungry UNC outlasts Ohio State in overtime
NEW YORK — North Carolina center Armando Bacot, one of the most prized big men in college basketball, went six minutes without seeing the floor in the first half of Saturday afternoon’s CBS Sports Classic matchup against No. 23 Ohio State.
Bacot committed an off-ball foul on Buckeyes five man Zed Key 72 seconds into the neutral site contest. Immediately, Tar Heels head coach Hubert Davis pulled Bacot.
Before the 6-foot-11, walking double-double returned to action, Davis subbed in bench contributors Puff Johnson, Tyler Nickel, Seth Trimble and Dontrez Styles. And, even after Bacot got back in, he struggled against a Buckeyes team with a clear size disadvantage. Bacot dropped a pass, had a shot blocked by Ohio State freshman center Felix Okpara and didn’t make a field goal until nearly 12 minutes into the game.
Bacot was bad until he was unstoppable. The senior scored 10 straight points for the Tar Heels down the stretch of the first half, almost single-handedly willing UNC back into a matchup that, one point, saw the Buckeyes command a 14-point advantage.
Bacot’s resurgence continued in the second half. He rounded out the day with 28 points and 15 rebounds. As they say, Bacot got his, and, more importantly for the comeback-hungry Tar Heels, they got theirs.
A resilient Buckeyes squad had a response or every punch Bacot and the trailing Tar Heels threw — until Northwestern transfer Pete Nance hit a game-tying buzzer beater. That was the momentum UNC needed to kickstart a finishing blow.
UNC, which had three players finish with 20 points, scored the first two baskets of overtime and didn’t look back, winning, 89-84.
“I just felt like in the second half their toughness, their will, their want to was exactly where it needed to be,” Tar Heels head coach Davis said.
The first half was a game of runs. After Ohio State (7-3, 1-0 Big Ten) shot out to a 5-0 lead, in part thanks to a Key 3-pointer, UNC (8-4, 1-1 ACC) countered with an 11-1 surge. The Tar Heels backcourt of RJ Davis and Caleb Love — a dynamic duo that helped power UNC to the National Championship last year but has underperformed this season — was humming.
Love, who passed up a look inside, drilled a 3-pointer from the top of the arc moments later: a shot that drew a thunderous cheer from a Tar Heel-friendly crowd in Madison Square Garden. Davis chipped in a pair of layups in the spurt. They finished with a combined 43 points.
It wasn’t long before Ohio State answered with an 11-1 run of its own, though.
A mix of youth and experience led the charge for the Buckeyes in the opening frame. Freshman forward Brice Sensabaugh, making his second consecutive start with Oklahoma State grad transfer Isaac Likekele out, and sixth-year forward Justice Sueing combined for 23 points in the first half.
Bacot’s absence helped the Buckeyes begin their run. Except, they kept it going once UNC’s star was back on the court, even stretching it to 18-2. UNC missed eight straight shots in that span. Okpara was the 6-foot-11 center turning heads, putting together a sequence where he had a steal on one end and a basket on the other.
The high point of the first half for Ohio State came when first-year playmakers Bruce Thornton and Sensabaugh dialed up back-to-back 3-pointers to give the Buckeyes a 34-20 advantage.
That’s when Bacot woke up.
Bacot pulled UNC within two possessions of Ohio State by himself. Still, because of timely contested jumpers from Thornton and two quick end-of-half baskets by Sueing — including a buzzer-beating 3-pointer — Ohio State entered intermission with a nine-point lead.
The roller coaster from the end of the first half carried over to the second period. Every time it looked like the Tar Heels were going to steal the lead, Ohio State had an answer.
Bacot extended his Herculean effort, and back and forth the teams went following the same pattern of UNC flirting with a comeback and Ohio State quelling said comeback.
That said, there was a different aura in the second frame — the persistent, goosebump-raising feeling like a pressing UNC was chipping away. If not in score, in energy.
“The difference in the game was the start of the second half,” Ohio State head coach Chris Holtmann said. “I just didn’t think we came out with — that’s my fault — we just didn’t come out with the necessary understanding of how the game was going to be changed.
“It was more just our defensive energy wasn’t what it needed to be.”
Spearheaded by Love and Davis, UNC’s guards brought pressure, and it played a significant role in the transition-happy Tar Heels finishing with 27 points off 16 Buckeyes turnovers.
The turning point occurred the back half of the period. UNC once again found itself in a double-digit hole, this time down, 66-55.
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Cue a 15-5 Tar Heels run that had a sky blue-coated-MSG rocking.
UNC got five straight points from Love — a five-second violation by the Buckeyes sandwiched in between — and then a free throw by Bacot after a brutal foul call on West Virginia transfer Sean McNeil, who appeared to be pulled down by Bacot.
Moments later, UNC pushed the ball in transition after Thornton went 1-of-2 at the free throw line, and, on the Tar Heels’ fourth look of their possession, Davis cashed in an and-one layup.
Leaky Black followed a pair of Sensabaugh free throws with a 3-pointer from the right wing over Sensabaugh to make it a one point game, 71-70 Ohio State.
The Buckeyes went more than five minutes without a field goal, as fans traded “HEELS” and “O-H-I-O” chants with under three minutes to go.
Sueing ended the drought with an outstretched layup by a fouling Bacot. The problem for Ohio State was, Davis responded with a 3-pointer that gave UNC its first lead of the game since the 13:22 mark of the first half.
What happened next was a thing of March — the second straight Buckeyes game to provide that feeling.
Key drilled a 3-pointer from the top of the arc. Then Bacot got a layup to go to knot things up again. And, with the clock winding down, Sensabaugh used a fake to set up a potential game-winner over Black.
A potential game-winner.
After calling a timeout, UNC sent the up-and-down affair to overtime.
Black, unguarded, flung an inbound pass to Nance, and the veteran forward just barely got a turnaround fadeaway off over Sensabaugh. It landed and was confirmed after review.
“That’s exactly how we’ve played it,” Holtmann said. “We were concerned about their guards getting loose. And we’ve always played 5-on-4. That’s kind of how we practice it.”
Regardless, it was the beginning of the end for the Buckeyes, who had one chance to tie the game at 87 points apiece in the waning seconds of overtime, but a Key travel threw a wrench in what ultimately was a game-ending possession.
“In the first half, Ohio State did a good job of getting the shots they wanted, getting all the offensive rebounds, and they really kind of punked us,” Bacot said.
“In the second half, I thought we did a good job coming out early, and then in the middle we kind of let up a little bit, but just our fight to come back and win in such a gutsy manner, it was just huge for us. And it’s something for us to build on.”
Saturday’s thriller is something for the Buckeyes to build on, too.
Even if they ended up on the wrong side of a buzzer beater nine days after using one to top Rutgers.
Quite simply, it was a boxing match in the Garden — both power conference squads went the distance, and UNC, the preseason AP No. 1 team in the country, won by decision.
