UNC basketball does what it can to polish NCAA Tournament resume ahead of Duke rematch

Not that anyone really knows what really goes on in the nether regions of the bubble, what feeds into those last couple votes on those last couple teams, but North Carolina now can be sure of this: It has made its case and has reason to believe it’s enough.

That’s true regardless of what happens Friday night against Duke in the third meeting of the season, the first time they’ve met in an ACC tournament since an epic semifinal in this same building in 2019 — the only Duke-UNC game Zion Williamson actually finished.

If beating Wake Forest on Thursday, 68-59 in a fiery ACC quarterfinal, wasn’t enough, then nothing the Tar Heels did here short of winning the whole thing was ever going to be enough.

“That was something that was mentioned each and every timeout we have,” North Carolina forward Jae’Lyn Withers said. “We know what’s at stake. We have to fight our way through this.”

As Bing Crosby famously crooned, “It’s beginning to look a lot like Dayton.” March is, after all, the most wonderful time of the year.

The talk of NCAA prospects was unavoidable, the unshakable subtext to this game, and while North Carolina did what it could to burnish its own, Wake Forest saw its hopes dashed despite finishing fourth in the ACC.

“You know, there was probably a time not that long ago when that wouldn’t have been the case,” Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said. “Maybe you’d have already been in, and you’d just be fighting for some seeding. But obviously, they’re still fighting. We were fighting. A credit to both teams for — I think it was a hard-fought, well-played game.”

And at this point, North Carolina is becoming the kind of team no one wants to play. Including, for that matter, Duke. Especially without Cooper Flagg and Maliq Brown, the former more famous, the latter perhaps more essential to Duke’s win in Chapel Hill five days ago. (“We’re aware,” Withers said.)

With Brady Withers/Jae’Lyn Manek stretching the floor and Ven-Allen Lubin doing his best Armando Bacot imitation, the Tar Heels have come on almost as strongly as that 2022 team did, with R.J. Davis and his 23 points Thursday moving from point guard then into Caleb Love’s designated shooter spot now.

Lubin had back-to-back dunks late — one off an Elliot Cadeau pass, the other off a Withers miss — that essentially put the Deacons away, mathematically and spiritually.

On an afternoon when North Carolina couldn’t make a shot at times — the Tar Heels went almost nine minutes without a bucket in the second half but still managed to cling to the lead — they were good enough on defense and on the boards to hold off Wake Forest. It was their worst shooting performance in any win this season.

That, for North Carolina, represents significant progress. The Tar Heels have talked about how they’ve been getting better since that first embarrassing Duke loss and since that narrow loss in Winston-Salem. And they were indeed more competitive against Duke on Saturday, and won a game they might earlier have lost against Wake Forest on Thursday.

“Back in November, I don’t think we would have won that game,” UNC freshman Drake Powell said. “We were able to execute down the stretch. We continue to grow.”

But there’s one ultimate test in this ACC, weakened and watered-down as it may be, and now it’s staring North Carolina in the face.

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This story was originally published March 13, 2025 at 6:15 PM with the headline "UNC basketball does what it can to polish NCAA Tournament resume ahead of Duke rematch."

Luke DeCock

The News & Observer

Luke DeCock is a former journalist for the News & Observer.