In each of the North Carolina women’s basketball team’s three straight losses prior to Sunday’s matchup with Duke, the Tar Heels were buried by their opponents’ precision from the charity stripe.
But this time, North Carolina couldn’t use poor free-throw shooting as its excuse.
For the first time in four games, North Carolina outshot its opponent at the line, but points from the stripe were not enough to end the Tar Heels’ losing streak. Despite going 73 percent, the Tar Heels fell to Duke 66-58.
UNC has struggled lately from the line — shooting 41 percent of their free throws against North Carolina State and 61 percent in Thursday’s loss to Georgia Tech. But Sunday, UNC looked like a different team when they shot from the line.
The Tar Heels hit 16-of-22 free throws — six percent better than the previous team average.
UNC coach Sylvia Hatchell said her team hasn’t practiced much since Thursday’s loss to Georgia Tech, and she seemed stumped as to what might have brought about the improvement.
“That’s a lot better than what we’ve been doing,” Hatchell said. “That might be something that they have been working on on their own, but we haven’t really practiced that.”
UNC led Duke 31-29 at halftime, following a half in which the Tar Heels shot 82 percent from the free-throw line and had three players shoot 2-for-2 from the stripe.
Prior to Sunday’s game, Krista Gross’ 57 percent mark was the lowest on the Tar Heels’ squad. But against the Blue Devils, the sophomore guard was a perfect 4-for-4. Two of those four came with just more than three minutes to play bringing the Tar Heels within eight points.