Normally, there is a lot of dissection and analysis at the end of a UNC basketball season. This season ended a little differently; Hubert Davis’s abrupt firing has put most of the focus on the coaching search for the next Carolina head coach. And rightly so; as a fan, I’d rather look forward than relive one of the worst collapses in NCAA tournament history.
Nevertheless, I think there’s something to be gained from parsing through last season’s stats to try and understand what went wrong (and even
what went right). These aren’t necessarily top line stats like three-point shooting or points per game. Rather, I wanted to share some interesting tidbits I think were either compelling or relevant to how UNC’s season went.
Free Throw Shooting: This one is probably obvious. UNC has struggled at the charity stripe the entire season. While there are many reasons UNC ultimately frittered away a 19-point lead against VCU, poor free throw shooting has to be near the top of the list. Carolina finished 12-20 from the line and repeatedly missed free throws down the stretch that could have helped them hang on until the final horn.
Back in December, I noted the Heels were shooting 68.9% from the free throw line and opined that Seth Trimble’s return could help improve that number. Instead, UNC as a team finished 321st in the country by knocking down 68.2% of their free throws. Trimble went from shooting 82.1% last year to 66.7% this season. It’s hard to know how much his midseason injury affected his free throw shooting stroke, but his regression at the line meant that UNC had few ball handlers in end of game situations they could trust to make their foul shots. This was UNC’s worst free throw shooting team since Roy William’s last squad.
The duality of UNC’s defense: Overall, Carolina finished with the 37th best defense according to KenPom (interestingly, the offense also finished ranked 37th). Drill a little deeper into those numbers, and some interesting trends emerge.
Let’s start with the positive: the Heels finished with one of the best two-point defenses in the country. UNC allowed opponents to shoot 46.2% on two pointers, good for 15th best in the country (they were as high as second until Caleb Wilson went down). It’s worth noting the Heels are in good company; Final Four teams Arizona, Michigan and Illinois all are in the top 15 in the country in this metric. KenPom also introduced a new metric this year measuring the average distance from the basket a team’s opponent takes their two-point shot from. UNC finished second in the country by this measure. It sounds a bit complicated, but in a nutshell, Carolina forced their opponents to take a lot of long two-point shots; this partially led UNC to having an excellent two-point defense.
On the other side of the coin, UNC’s opponents were able to take a lot of those shots because the Heels were really bad at causing turnovers. The team only forced a turnover on 13.6% of their defensive possessions, finishing 344th in the country in defensive turnover percentage. Carolina was poor at both creating steals or forcing turnovers in other ways. The Heels just didn’t have anyone capable of pressuring the ball consistently. Wilson led the team in steal percentage; losing him deprived UNC of their best player at creating turnovers on a team that was already collectively bad at it.
Controlling the opening tip: I wrote about this once before in mid-February. It’s become a bit of an obsession for me since then; I noted then that UNC had only controlled the opening tipoff seven times out of 24 games played (29% win percentage). It seemed a bit odd considering that UNC fielded one of the tallest frontcourts in the country. Frankly, I thought maybe it was just a statistical anomaly, either bad luck or a small sample size outlier.
So how have the Heels done in tipoffs since then? Well, they lost almost every single one. Since that article was published on February 14th, UNC lost every opening tip for the rest of the regular season and the ACC tournament; at one point they had lost 11 opening tipoffs in a row. They finally broke the streak by winning the opening tip against VCU…only to lose one more tipoff at the start of the overtime period. Ultimately, Carolina won eight out of the 35 tipoffs they participated in, or just under 23%.
As I previously noted, this isn’t one of the major reasons the UNC team underperformed. For whatever reason, this team just wasn’t good at tipoffs. While it probably only mattered a bit at the margins, it’s another area in which the ‘25/’26 Tar Heels squad just wasn’t quite good enough. If for no other reason than sheer curiosity, it’s a stat I’ll keep an eye on next year as a new head coach takes the reins.
