Breaking: Better basketball being played between blizzards
Don’t look now, but the Tar Heels are on a three-game win streak, spanning two different winter weather systems here in the Triangle In most years, if you said that the Tar Heels had seen two separate instances of accumulation of wintery precipitation fall and melt without dropping a game, you would likely expect the win total to be slightly higher than three. And yet, just as the size of the snowman is limited by the amount of snow around it, the plows are out in Chapel Hill for the second straight weekend, and Carolina’s snow day dominance sits at three games.
A little over a week ago, I wrote about the Tar Heels numbers from beyond the arc, and how the trip out West had resulted in a pretty chilly couple of performances from deep. Luckily, since then, the Heels have begun to heat up. Against Notre Dame, for example, three Tar Heels hit more than one triple. Against then-#14 UVA, four Tar Heels did. Yesterday, against Georgia Tech? Only one.
It’s not all Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining, though. While the chill really set in further from the basket, Carolina provided heat in other ways. The most obvious, of course, was Luka Bogavac; 3-7 from three for the guard from Montenegro, which puts him at two straight games with multiple made threes. Like the winter sun finally parting storm clouds, it’s good to see the promised shooting prowess starting to peek through as the season progresses.
The most welcome change, though? Free throw shooting. The team from Chapel Hill missed only one free throw on the day, leaving scorch marks at the charity stripe after going 11-12. Free throws have been a glaring weak spot for this team thus far in the season, and a trend in the right direction in this category could lead to lots more good things down the road.
We can only hope that road has already been plowed, and that this team carries this heat through the February grind and into the Madness of March.
Category: General Sports
