2015 NCAA Tournament: Q&A With Keeping It Heel
By Jim Oxley
The Wisconsin Badgers and North Carolina Tar Heels square off in a NCAA Tournament Sweet Sixteen matchup Thursday in Los Angeles.
The 33-3 Badgers finished the regular season at No. 3 in the AP poll, while the 26-11 North Carolina Tar Heels ended up at No. 15. Don’t be fooled by the 11 losses, this Tar Heels squad has been through the wringer and survived, and will be looking to get past Wisconsin Thursday night.
Wisconsin Badgers
To get some insight on this North Carolina squad, we caught up with John Bauman, editor of Keeping It Heel, the Fansided North Carolina site.
Be sure to check out KeepingItHeel.com and give both John and Keeping It Heel a follow on Twitter. We answered some questions of theirs, head over to their site to check out our responses.
Now, on to our questions. Stay tuned as we’ll catch up with Keeping It Heel again before the Sweet Sixteen matchup.
BoH: Tell me a little about the Tar Heels’ season. What was the high point and the low point for North Carolina?
KiH: It is hard to categorize UNC’s season in just one or two peaks or valleys. The Tar Heels started off 6-3 with two bad losses to Butler and Iowa, so that was a low point. But the team rebounded and went 11-1 over their next twelve games, including a 7-1 start to ACC play. The only loss over that stretch was to Notre Dame on January 5th, and that was by just one point. The wins against Louisville and N.C. State during this middle section of the season were two major high points in the year.
But, the Tar Heels faded back down after they lost five of their next seven games, including tough losses to Duke, Virginia and Louisville. The season ended on somewhat of a high note when the Tar Heels reached the ACC Championship game, but, that excitement was killed pretty quickly when the Heels lost by 8 in the tournament final.
UNC hasn’t had a true high point or low point. The wins and losses have been spread out and UNC really hasn’t played its best basketball over a consistent stretch of the season yet this year.
BoH: Playing a gauntlet of a conference schedule, how has playing the likes of Duke, Notre Dame, Virginia and Louisville multiple times this season prepared this squad?
Wisconsin will be the 8th game against a KenPom top-10 team. It will be interesting to see if the Heels learned some lessons from the close losses in those six games against top-10 KenPom teams and if they will use the lessons in this next game against Wisconsin.
KiH: The Tar Heels did play a very tough schedule – the second hardest schedule overall according to kenpom.com. The Tar Heels have played seven games against the current top 10 in the KenPom Basketball rankings, and went 1-6 in those games.
UNC learned a lot in each of those matchups, but one thing they didn’t learn even as the season went along was how to close out games against top opponents. The Heels really struggled in the second half to hold on to leads, letting the other teams climb back in while UNC turned the ball over and played conservatively.
Wisconsin will be the 8th game against a KenPom top-10 team. It will be interesting to see if the Heels learned some lessons from the close losses in those six games against top-10 KenPom teams and if they will use the lessons in this next game against Wisconsin.
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BoH: What did the team take away from a non-conference match up with Kentucky?
KiH: UNC lost by 14 against the Wildcats back on December 14th. Carolina learned less than you might think from that game. It was really never close, as Kentucky jumped out to a big lead and never let the Heels climb back in. According to kenpom.com, Kentucky’s minimum win probability in that game was 88.2%, when the score was tied 4-4 with 18:15 left in the 1st half.
If anything, fans learned that UNC probably wasn’t going to be a Top 5 or Top 10 team that many pundits picked them to be at the beginning of the season. That game kind of quieted expectations for the rest of the season. The team learned they had a lot of work left to do if they wanted to make some noise in both the ACC and in the postseason.
BoH: How has North Carolina replaced James Michael McAdoo this year?
KiH: UNC has done a really good job of replacing James Michael McAdoo. Brice Johnson has done a good job of filling in for McAdoo in the starters role, and Isaiah Hicks has played well as the backup four.
Carolina’s offense might even be better without Mac. McAdoo took a lot of fadeaway jumpers, missed a lot of free throws and overall wasn’t a very efficient offensive player. Johnson is a much more efficient player in his place, and UNC’s offense has been much more efficient all together with Johnson this year than McAdoo last year.
BoH: North Carolina survived a scare from Harvard then moved on quickly past Arkansas. What’s your thoughts on the tournament run so far?
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KiH: UNC did not play well against Harvard, allowing the Crimson to climb back into the ballgame and just barely surviving after some late game heroics by Justin Jackson. The Heels did play much better against Arkansas and take a lot of positive momentum into the game on Thursday against Wisconsin.
The big takeaways for me so far from this tournament run are that Marcus Paige is finally playing well and that UNC’s freshman, Justin Jackson, Joel Berry II and Theo Pinson are all playing much better than they have all season long. While I think the tournament run will come to an end on Thursday at the hands of Wisconsin, this run has been valuable to those four players to gain experience and to play well in a big tournament like this one.
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Thanks again, John. Stay tuned for more collaboration from Keeping It Heel and Badger of Honor.