Hubert Davis “very disappointed” in Tar Heels’ performance at Miami

UNC basketball head coach Hubert Davis was “very disappointed” in his team’s performance against the Miami Hurricanes on Tuesday night.

The North Carolina Tar Heels put together one of the most careless, embarrassing, lackadaisical performances that we’ve seen from them in a long time when they took on the Miami Hurricanes in Coral Gables on Tuesday night. And that’s saying a lot when you consider the fact that we watched them take a 29-point beatdown at the hands of the Kentucky Wildcats just one month ago to the day.

First-year head coach Hubert Davis spoke to the media after the game, touching on a number of the Tar Heels’ struggles over the season’s first 17 games — a stretch that has seen them lose five times by an average of 17.6 points.

"“At times throughout the year there has been a change in mentality and effort and toughness and then we have a game like this and I am just very disappointed,” Davis said following the Tar Heels’ 85-57 loss. “Very disappointed in our fight, competitiveness, our effort. Just very disappointed.In order to be a good team you have to have leadership and there has to be somebody outside of me, outside of the coaching staff, that has a voice in the locker room that is amongst the players that binds us together. I’ve never seen a good team absent of that. At this moment, we do not have any. And that is something that needs to change, that has to change, and must change. And my hope is that it will change. But at this moment we do not have any.”"

This isn’t the first time that Davis has talked about his team’s lack of effort and toughness. In fact, we’ve heard it all too often over the past two months as we’ve watched them beat up on bad teams and lose to just about everyone else. And who could forget that disappointing loss to a very “middle-of-the-road” Notre Dame squad?

It’s been ugly, and the team has given its coaches and fans very little to be optimistic about. But do this season’s results rest solely on the players? What about the coaching staff that can’t seem to motivate their players or properly game-plan for a team that executes the pick-and-roll as well as Miami? What about when obvious in-game adjustments are needed but not made, or when players continue to go under ball screens despite giving up countless three-pointers?

Suffice it to say that there are a lot of problems with this team as it stands, and I can’t see the current iteration of Tar Heels being a successful unit when March rolls around. It’s one thing to take some lumps during the season and then learn from them and get better. It’s an entirely different thing to lose by 29 points to a superior opponent, beat up on a couple of underachievers by double-digits, and then lose to the next good team on the schedule by 28.

It’s been embarrassing, to say the least, but it’s not the fans that should be embarrassed. It’s the players and coaching staff that should be taking more pride in their efforts on the court and putting a premium on accountability when they don’t achieve the intended results. When that happens, we might have a team worth watching.

But until then, I wouldn’t get too excited about the prospects of a team that still doesn’t have one quality win on the season, and losses to every above-average opponent they’ve faced.

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