UNC basketball team gets exhibition win against Shaw

An early five-point deficit and a halftime lead of four points in an exhibition game might be troubling for some teams.

But instead of pressing the panic button, the North Carolina men’s basketball team kicked it into the next gear and soundly defeated Shaw 81-54 Friday night.

“I thought it was a really good night for us,” coach Roy Williams said. “I even liked it when they took the lead there because those are the kinds of things that we’re going to face all year, so I liked the way our guys responded.”

The Tar Heels got off to a sluggish start, only scoring six points in the first five minutes of the contest. Then freshman center Joel James came off the bench to take over sophomore forward Desmond Hubert’s spot.

It only took a little more than a minute for James to swish in a fluid hook shot for his first points as a Tar Heel. James’ bucket sparked 13 unanswered Tar Heel points. James scored four points in the run while fellow freshman Brice Johnson added four points of his own.

“Joel’s a big body,” Williams said. “He gives us that presence inside. He’s going to mess it up sometimes, but I think he does give us that inside.”

Though the Tar Heels used the freshmen post players to dig out of an early first-half deficit, in the second half it was the team’s veteran shooting guards who slammed the door on Shaw.

Facing a three-point deficit with 17 minutes remaining in the game, UNC had to dig deep and look to its experienced players to turn things around.

James Michael McAdoo started the process with a steal and a resulting dunk to bring UNC within one point of the Bears. UNC and Shaw battled in a close game for three and a half minutes before UNC began to break the game wide open.

Senior guard Dexter Strickland fired a cross-court outlet pass to an unguarded P.J. Hairston on the wing. Without hesitation, Hairston pulled the trigger and fired a long-distance shot. The ball sailed through the air, through the rim and dropped out the bottom of the net for Hairston’s first 3-pointer.

But the sophomore guard wasn’t done there. Less than a minute later he caught another pass from Strickland to score again. Hairston topped off his flurry of baskets with a driving basket in the paint.

“It felt real good,” Hairston said. “I kinda got hype, but I didn’t want to show emotion because I was playing good defense and I had to get back on defense.

“It felt good knowing my shot was falling and getting back into the rhythm.”

The Tar Heels continued to build on the momentum throughout the rest of the game and were not only able to exercise their offensive prowess but also tighten their defense to a stranglehold.

While Shaw made five of 11 first half 3-point attempts, UNC amped up its defense in the second half and, as a result, the Bears didn’t hit anything from behind the arc.

And, after allowing Shaw to shoot 39.4 percent in the first half, the Tar Heels buckled down and limited the Bears to 25.8 percent.

“I think it was a combination of them tiring down and us really breaking it open and keeping our foot on their neck,” McAdoo said. “I think it all happened on the defensive end, just turning up the pressure and keeping it up. It just led to easy baskets on the offensive end.”