Pitt is getting set to host No. 25 North Carolina on Friday for a noon tip at the Petersen Events Center. The Panthers are off to a 2-0 start in the ACC, and will look to begin league play 3-0 for the first time since the 2015-16 season.
Squaring off with a ranked team obviously makes that proposition even more difficult, but this isn’t just any ranked team. It’s probably safe to say there aren’t 24 teams better than the North Carolina Tar Heels are in all of college basketball.
North Carolina entered the season as the preseason number one team in the country. They returned four starters off a team that made a run to the national title game a season ago. The Tar Heels feature preseason ACC Player of the Year Armando Bacot and a dynamic backcourt led by Caleb Love and RJ Davis.
“I think obviously they are really, really talented and they’re playing well right now,” Pitt head coach Jeff Capel said in his press conference on Wednesday. “They hit a bump in the road this year. They had to deal with some injuries and sometimes when you have great success like they did, how do you handle that success?”
After a magical March Madness run all the way to the title game, the Tar Heels did not meet the preseason hype initially. North Carolina sustained a four-game losing steak at the end of November, but have seemingly found their grove since then. The Heels have won four in a row, including back-to-back wins over Ohio State and Michigan.
“They took some lumps this year, but they’ve eaten that,” Capel said of his team’s next opponent. “They’ve learned from it and they’re playing really, really well right now.”
The same could be say for the Panthers. After a 1-3 start to the season, Pitt has won eight of the last nine games, including three in a row and come into this game with a 9-4 overall record. In Pitt’s last game, they went into Syracuse and grabbed a hard-earned 84-82 win over the Orange.
Syracuse is a unique matchup for the defensive style it plays, while North Carolina creates its own mismatches for different reasons. The Tar Heels play with great tempo and of course that style is driven by tremendous talent.
North Carolina features the ACC’s top two scorers in Love (18.3 point per game) and Bacot (18.2 ppg). Davis, the team’s point guard, is not far behind at 15.9 per contest, good for tenth in the league. Capel also called forward Pete Nance one of the ‘best transfers’ and labeled wing Leaky Black as ‘the ultimate glue guy’.
It’s a complete North Carolina team that had a lot of success a season ago, but before that great run through March started the Tar Heels were a bubble team and lost to Pitt 76-67 at home. Jamarius Burton was around for that victory in Chapel Hill and scored 14 points and grabbed seven rebounds. He is seeing a lot of the same faces and believes they can take some concepts from that game and apply it to Friday.
“I would say for the most part they’ve got a lot of their guys back, so it’s pretty much a lot of the same pieces, they’ve just got another year under their belts,” Burton said of the Tar Heels. “They’re very dynamic. We’re taking our scouting report from last year and putting some wrinkles and we’ve just got to come together on Friday with our hardhats on.”
Love scored 19 against Pitt last season and has been the go-to threat for North Carolina this season. He is coming off an 18-point, 5-rebound, and 4-assist game against Michigan last week.
“I would just say he’s a three-level scorer,” Burton said of the ACC’s leading scorer. "You’ve got to respect him at all levels, and that’s what makes a guy dangerous is when they’re very versatile and he has that.”
Pitt is playing its best basketball perhaps since Capel has taken over the program. They are doing it without their leading scorer and rebounder from last season, as John Hugley’s junior year has been marred with injuries thus far. He has missed the last two games, and Capel did not have an update if he would be available for Friday’s game.
Even without Hugley contributing much, this team has found a spark and have done it behind a trio of senior guards: Nelly Cummings, Greg Elliott, and Burton. Hinson has been huge to the success as well as he is the reigning ACC Player of the Week, and one of two players in the league averaging at least 17 points and 7 rebounds per game (Bacot being the other).
The group has displayed some continuity with one another through 13 games and they are on the eve of their biggest game of the season to date, but the talk at the press conference was not entirely about North Carolina.
There was some other news that stole some of the attention.
Dior Johnson, the highest rated recruit Capel has landed at Pitt, was reinstated to the program following an off-the-court arrest from earlier this year. Johnson had previously been suspended indefinitely, but the program announced on Wednesday he would be brought back, but would likely take a redshirt this season.
“When he came back he obviously had some things to say to the locker room and after that we had a family meeting and been back to business,” Burton said of his teammate being reinstated. “We’re looking forward to an awesome opponent coming in on Friday and we’re just trying to keep the main thing the main thing.”
And of course, the main thing for Pitt right now is the game with North Carolina.
So while Pitt is facing the 25th ranked team on paper, Capel and his team are well aware of how good this North Carolina team can be once they are clicking. Given that this Carolina team has won four in a row, the Pitt head coach is starting to see the team that resembles the national runner-up from a year ago, not the one that lost four in a row earlier this season.
“I don’t see much of a difference of where they are right now as to where they were at the end of the year, especially how they’ve played over the last four games,” Capel said. “So we’re playing against one of the most talented teams in the country and one of the teams with the most continuity of guys that have played together.”
