WRAL Sports Fan

North Carolina

Carolina runs away from Duke, 75-60

By David Reynolds

Feb 10, 2009

For nearly eighteen minutes in the first half, No. 4 Duke’s pressure defense made No. 8 North Carolina look like anything but one of the nation’s top women’s programs.

The Tar Heels were finding just about every way to give up possession of the ball to the Blue Devils. They threw bad passes. They took bad shots. They traveled. They double dribbled. They committed charging fouls. They even managed a rare three-seconds-in-the-lane violation to boot.

“We were excited and overdoing everything. We were doing things we don’t usually do – taking quick shots, not rebounding,” Rashanda McCants said. “It wasn’t a comfortable feeling out there in the first half, and you could probably see it on everybody’s faces.”

Duke flummoxed North Carolina into a whopping 20 turnovers – a game’s worth – in the first period alone. With the score 27-15 in favor of the Blue Devils and just more than two minutes left in the first half, it appeared UNC wouldn’t even score more points than it had turnovers. But that’s when things began to click for the Tar Heels.

“I think we thought the game started at 8:15 instead of 7:30,” UNC coach Sylvia Hatchell said. “Thank goodness we got going the last three minutes of the first half and got the score back close.”

UNC went on a 10-0 run in the final minutes – ending with a buzzer-beating two-pointer by She’la White –and sliced Duke’s lead to two. Even after what was perhaps UNC’s worst half of the season, the game was well within reach and all the momentum was with the home team.

“We were on the up going into the half and that shot made it even better,” McCants said. “If (White) would have missed it there’s no telling how the momentum would have been.”

North Carolina continued its offensive surge after the break, easily breaking through the double teams and full-court pressure that had caused its frenzy of turnovers in the first half. Once the Tar Heels (21-3, 6-2) solved Duke’s defensive puzzle, they sped away from the Blue Devils (19-3, 7-2) with 50 second-half points to take a 75-60 victory.

McCants led UNC’s surge with 19 of her 22 points in the second half, and point guard Cetera DeGraffenreid also provided a second-half spark by scoring nine of her 15 after the break.

“We stopped thinking and trying to adjust to everything they were doing out there and we started playing hard and playing the way we know how to play,” Hatchell said.

Duke coach Joanne P. McCallie was not pleased with her team’s inability to hold onto its early advantage. She was pleased with forcing the Tar Heels into 20 turnovers but said it was inexcusable that UNC was able to claw back to within two points before the break.

“The bad news was the speed we tried to play at. We were out of control, we missed almost every shot we took,” McCallie said. “I felt that if we had slowed down on offense in the first half we could have gone in with a substantial lead.”

The Blue Devils shot 26 percent in the first half and finished 29 percent from the field for the game. UNC’s defense held Chante Black, Duke’s leading scorer, to only 13 points and didn’t give its opponent many second chances on the boards. The Tar Heels out-rebounded their rival 54-38, and Jessica Breland corralled 23 rebounds all by herself.

“I was just really focused on rebounding because (Hatchell) said if we win the boards then we win the game,” Breland said. “I was just focusing on that because my offense wasn’t there.”

Breland also added five blocks in the game, and her presence in the post deterred several of Duke’s interior players from taking shots close to the basket.

After the game, Hatchell joked over the public address system to the Smith Center crowd that the team was “sorry for the first seventeen minutes” before thanking them for supporting her team. She said that after enduring the futility her team showed for most of the first half, she’s knows what her team can take from this game.

“It doesn’t matter how bad we play, we can still win.”