Tar Heels will try to get well in road game against Hokies

Reeling North Carolina, at 2-4, is near the bottom of the ACC

By: By Bill Cole | JOURNAL REPORTER
Published: February 04, 2010

One of the toughest seven-day periods of the season for North Carolina will begin today, far from home and the comfort of the Smith Center.

Coach Roy Williams has no idea what frame of mind his team will be in when it hits the court in Blacksburg, Va., for a game against Virginia Tech at 9 p.m.

"We've been pretty high and pretty low," Williams said. "It's one end of the spectrum to the other."

North Carolina will stay on the road on Sunday for a game at Maryland. Duke will visit Chapel Hill next Wednesday. Williams needs answers for his struggling team, and they will have to be found under demanding circumstances.

North Carolina has lost five of seven games, and has fallen near the bottom of the ACC. In 21 previous seasons, Williams has never gone this deep into a season trying to figure out what to do to help his team. Sunday's 75-60 loss to Virginia was marked by little enthusiasm and poor execution, and the outcome heaped more doubt on an already frustrated team.

"It's the total package," Williams said when citing what's wrong with his team. "The day before (the game) we go crazy about not getting great defensive balance, and yet a couple of times in the game we didn't have great defensive balance.

"We've had 61 practices now, and things that I've preached for the previous 21 years seem to work, and the things that I've preached this year, the same as those 21, haven't worked. So I've got to find a different way to do it, to find something different."

The Tar Heels are 13-8 overall and 2-4 in the ACC. The Hokies are 16-4 and 3-3. Williams can find some encouragement in the Tar Heels' first game against the Hokies, in Chapel Hill last month, when a second-half rally led to a 78-64 win in his team's ACC opener.

North Carolina won the first game between the teams by withstanding a 26-point performance by guard Malcolm Delaney, who was playing then on a gimpy ankle, and by shutting down Virginia Tech inside.

Virginia Tech's frontline starters then scored only 13 points combined. Bullish forward Jeff Allen was held to four points and limited to five shots from the field. North Carolina played one of its top defensive games, holding Virginia Tech to 35.8-percent shooting from the field.

North Carolina's problems might disappear for a half or even for a game, but they always come back.

"We're not running the ball anything like I would like to run it," Williams said. "We're playing zone. We've got three or four different offenses that we've tried to use, as opposed to sticking with one."

Williams said he won't give up on the season. He expects his players not to give up either, although their blase demeanor against Virginia concerned him.

"We've worked on trying to guard the dribble and stop dribble penetration, and we didn't do a very good job with that (against Virginia)," Williams said.

"We wanted to try to move the ball quickly and have good spacing and get a good quality shot for us, and try to make sure the quality of their shot was not very good. We wanted to dominate the backboards.

"I don't know that any of those things happened. It's not just one thing. We've got some work to do."

bcole@wsjournal.com