UNC men's basketball gets defensive at ACC Media Day

CHARLOTTE — While the North Carolina men’s basketball team entered ACC Media Day on Wednesday with as much praise and potential as any team in the country, there are still questions the team will have to answer when the season begins on Nov. 13 against Temple.

There are the obvious ones, like who will be the fifth starter alongside forwards Justin Jackson and Kennedy Meeks, preseason second-team All-ACC forward Brice Johnson and preseason first-team All-ACC guard Marcus Paige?

While no one — including Coach Roy Williams — knows the answer to that question right now, the answer will come the first game of the season.

A question that isn’t so easily answered, though, is what the defensive makeup of this North Carolina squad will be.

“We’ve had 15 or 16 practices and probably the first 10 were straight defense,” said Jackson, who was present at media day along with Meeks. “Obviously, seeing that, Coach’s mindset is: we have to be better on defense.”

And based on the topics of conversation throughout the day, from Williams and his two players, that’s been a big point of emphasis for the team so far.

“I think this year Coach has really been focusing more on (defense),” Meeks said. “If we don’t get a stop or something like that we’ll run, or just little simple things like that to make us better defensively.

“We run a lot.”

Williams pointed to fellow ACC coach Tony Bennett of Virginia to show the importance of strong defensive play.

“I asked the players the other day, who was the best defensive team in our league last year?” Williams said. “Everybody said Virginia. I said, ‘They’ve won it the last two years in a row, doesn’t that tell you something?’”

After holding opponents to just 53.6 points per game over the past two seasons — due to an extremely slow tempo — Bennett and the Cavaliers have been the ACC regular season champions in back-to-back years.

The Tar Heels appear to be a talented offensive team, but the defensive side of the game is what could put them over the top — what could help them compete for a national championship — which Meeks made clear is the goal.

But the issue is that J.P. Tokoto, arguably UNC’s top defender from the 2014-15 season, is no longer with the team.

“I don’t know that I have anybody right now that I would say, ‘I’m going to put so-and-so on him,’” said Williams, referring to how Tokoto would often guard the opposing team’s top-scoring threat a season ago.

When Meeks was asked who could fill that void this season, he immediately named sophomore swingman Theo Pinson and first-year Kenny Williams — the former coming back from foot surgery and the latter unproven at the collegiate level.

But regardless of who that person winds up being, if anyone, it’s clear it will be a key factor for the Tar Heels’ success this season.

“I’d like to have somebody step forward and take that spot,” Williams said. “Because I think it’s crucial to how good you can be.”

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