Thursday Three-Pointer: Week VIII

CHESTNUT HILL, Mass. -- Located just off Route 501 in Chapel Hill, the Dean E. Smith Center is one of college basketball's crown jewels. It's a cathedral and has served as the home arena for four of the Tar Heels' six national championship teams. Named for the legendary UNC coach of the program, it seats more fans than every arena in the NBA, and the court itself is adorned with the name of Roy Williams - arguably the second-most famous coach in program history after Smith.

Walking into the arena offers a sweeping view of college basketball's bluest-blooded program. Carolina blue adorns everything right down to the seats, but the court is the most distinctive piece of its history. It hasn't changed save for a couple of accents, but it still very much represents a history dating back to when a freshman named Michael Jordan hit the game-winning shot to win the 1982 national championship.

Playing at the Dean Dome includes an intimidating presence but its simplistic view is built into college basketball's purity. There is no way out of the building except to go through its home tenant, and despite the national championship banners and longstanding history, it's easy to get fired up to play a game in which thousands of Carolinians scream their support for their gladiators in the arena.

Taming that coliseum creates instant legends, and while Boston College didn't defeat UNC on its home court, it earned a measure of respect for holding the Tar Heels' to their lowest field goal percentage ever in a victory - a stark counterpoint to the blowout victory in their first meetup of the season.

"It was a great environment," Boston College head coach Earl Grant said. "This is the kind of environment, as a player, you want to play in. I thought our guys did a great job. We didn't really hear the crowd after the first three minutes, and the game was back-and-forth. They would throw a punch, and we would throw a punch. It was a great atmosphere. A lot of blue, had to be 14,000 people or so it seemed, but it was a great environment."

Handling the Dean Dome offered the latest image of how BC is continuing its growth into Earl Grant's program. UNC is a potential tournament team according to the latest ESPN Bracketology, having possibly earned a No. 10 seed as one of the final teams receiving a First Four bye. It beat BC by 26 points in their first meeting three weeks ago, and the majority of analytics predicted a second disastrous outing for the Eagles after a blowout loss two days earlier at Wake Forest.

Instead, the Eagles gave the Tar Heels all they could handle across a full 40 minutes. The defense defended the paint with ferocity against Armando Bacot, holding the ACC's leader in field goal percentage to 1-of-10 shooting, snapping his streak of 10 straight double-doubles. BC nearly outscored UNC on points in the paint by a 2:1 ratio, and the stingy defense employed by the Eagles was on point for the majority of the game.

Losing that game stemmed from individual areas after BC failed to hit a 3-pointer in the second half. UNC went to the free throw line 25 times and converted 20 attempts while shooting 6-for-17 from the outside, and the Eagles' offense went stone cold over the last seven-plus minutes of the second half. Those are all items that need addressing as the season enters the final month of the regular season.

But UNC was not the decisive better team on Wednesday night. BC lost two of its games over the six-day stretch, but it arguably earned enough respect and goodwill to set a tone and lay a foundation for the next month and beyond.

Here's a recap of what we learned over the last week:

1) The Good
The week actually began with a good amount of positive energy after BC split its two games against Clemson and Louisville. The 13-point loss to Louisville came under the strangest circumstances after the Cardinals' arena sprung a leak, but it remained an evenly-played game until the latter stages. It also followed the comeback win over the Tigers, a game in which BC throttled its way to win after falling behind in the first half.

Both of those results generated optimism, and the good vibrations rooted deeply before BC's home game against Virginia Tech. The Eagles were essentially favored by most predictive formulas, but they beat the Hokies by offering their most complete game of the season. Virginia Tech threatened, but unlike the Pittsburgh and Georgia Tech games when BC trailed, the Eagles slammed the door on an opponent by scoring and defending down the stretch against an imminent threat.

"I knew their pace on offense was going to be really fast," Grant said after the win. "Mike Young is a really good coach, and I was a little familiar with his team because he was at Wofford [as both an assistant coach and head coach] for 30 years. He recruited me out of high school, and we scrimmaged him when I was at Winthrop years ago. So I knew the pace was going to be really, really fast."

Virginia Tech was a unique experience, and it built more energy for the Eagles' two-game swing in North Carolina. The Wake Forest game didn't go as planned, but that led directly to the way BC challenged UNC with a clear understanding of how to win. The same predictive formulas foresaw a decisive Tar Heel win, but nearly every facet short of the above categories tilted to the Eagles as the game moved forward.

"We have to go back and watch the film in the next couple of days," Grant said, "but they did a good job on defense. We missed a few shots, but we got to the rim. It was a combination of things and we have to give them credit for hunkering down in those last four minutes. We had good opportunities at the rim, but we just came up empty."

2) The Bad
Not everything was a delicious plate of biscuits and gravy over the past week, so we won't ignore or overlook the Wake Forest game. The final score wasn't a good result and it snowballed after BC struggled to consistently put shots in the hole. Wake Forest was too good of a team offensively to have that happen against, but their ability to hit buckets created a self-propagating cycle where the Deacs would score, BC would miss, and the chasm would grow.

The result caused some of the season-long numbers to tilt, and BC lost 10 slots in both the KenPom and ESPN Basketball Power Index ratings. Wake Forest moved into the top-30, all but assuring the Demon Deacons of an at-large bid, according to the most recent Bracketology.

Like anything else, though, there's a "but" side of things. I didn't think BC played particularly poorly after things started to stabilize, and while the score was out of reach, the plaguing issues boiled down to shot selections and rushed possessions. The Eagles appeared visibly impatient with their ball movement, but Wake's offense kept hitting shots, which in turn denied any kind of defensive rhythm on which they could key energy from.

"We still have a team that's trying to figure out how to win," Grant said after the loss. "We played 36 hours before the Wake game, and we played great and hard, but you have to get back up and do it again. Mentally, we just didn't have the juice we needed on both ends of the floor. A big thing was early in the game when we missed a lot of shots that we had opportunities to stick in the basket."

The Wake Forest game was a blowout, but it also was really the first time BC had to analyze what went wrong in that kind of loss. The final score was similar to the first UNC game, but the circumstances surrounding that result made the game a bit of an analytics throwaway. BC wasn't at full health vs. Carolina after a COVID-induced pause, and the contributing factors of not having a full, healthy roster made breaking down that game particularly difficult. Wake Forest was different, and as the UNC game on Wednesday proved, the learning and growth opportunities were very real.

3) The In-Between
So that leads back to the UNC game.

BC doesn't have the kind of overall record to warrant a place in the NCAA Tournament discussion, but its resume is steadily growing. The team is 8-11 overall but could easily have won in seven of those losses, meaning the Eagles are within a dozen possessions of holding a 15-4 overall record. The difference is obviously razor-thin, but it also shows how the Eagles aren't as far from competing at a high level as the record or experts want to think.

The UNC game is the perfect indicator of the learning curve in Earl Grant's first season. BC could - and likely should - have beaten the Tar Heels after shooting better both on overall percentages and within the paint. A little bit of foul trouble helped send UNC to the line 25 times, but removing even six or seven of those free throws and adding one or two additional three-pointers turns an 11-point loss into road victory.

"I thought 10 or 12 of our 3-point shot attempts were pretty good," Grant said. "The iron was unkind, I give my guys credit. We played hard enough to make it a one or two possession game for 37 minutes without making shots. If we made those shots, we maybe would have been up by 12 points. But we gave ourselves a chance without making the shots. I thought the bigger disparity was on free throws when they shot 25. We shot eight, so that's a 17-point difference. So we have to keep building."

The in-between balances the "should have won" against the "didn't win" aspects of the game. Yes, BC could have won that game by simply removing some of UNC's free throws or hitting a couple of more 3-pointers, and yes, it's true that the Eagles didn't win because it's impossible to remove points from a final score. The in-between, though, is the bridge between the two, and the Eagles have shown a willingness to constantly work on covering that gap. They might not be there yet, but they will get there, sooner rather than later.

Layup Line: ACC
This week starts the final run-up to the 2022 New York Life ACC Men's Basketball Tournament, to be held between March 8 and March 12 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. The bracket, as usual, features all 15 teams and is spread out over five rounds, beginning with the six lowest-seeded teams in the First Round on the first day.

The UNC loss dropped Boston College to 3-6 in league play and tied the Eagles with Clemson, Syracuse and Pittsburgh for a four-way tie for ninth place. NC State and Georgia Tech sit a half-game back in 13th, and Virginia Tech, is a full game behind the quadrangle in 15th.

BC is currently 1-1 against the other three teams in its tiebreaker, which is significant given games remaining against both Syracuse and Clemson. The ACC uses a head-to-head format among tied teams for any tie involving three or more teams, and BC, while having lost to Georgia Tech, still very much controls its own destiny for a first round bye over the last month.

That doesn't mean the race is down to just these four teams, however. Louisville is 1.5 games ahead of Clemson, BC and the rest, and Virginia is a game ahead of the Cardinals. Miami remains the league's leading team, but Duke, Notre Dame and Wake Forest are all one-half game behind the Hurricanes heading into this weekend. Those four teams currently control the coveted "double-byes" into the quarterfinal round, while North Carolina and Florida State are both less than a game behind those spots.

BC plays both Pittsburgh and Virginia this week and can start to separate itself into the middle tier with a good, competitive week. The Pitt series is memorable for the way the home team typically wins games, and BC infamously beat a defending national champion Virginia team in January, 2020, 60-52. The Eagles lost their only game against the Cavaliers last season, but the new defensive style, coupled with Tony Bennett's typical defensive mindset, all but assures a wide-open result, even if the game is one of the lowest-scoring affairs of the season.

Both games are scheduled for the ACC Network, with the Pittsburgh game tipping off on Saturday at 4 p.m. The Virginia game will tip off on Tuesday at 8 p.m. from the John Paul Jones Coliseum, and both games are available for radio broadcast via the Boston College Sports Network from Learfield, local in Boston on WEEI 850 AM.

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