PITTSBURGH — A week that was so hard ended with such ease Saturday afternoon. It brought little solace to a shaken, and stirred, North Carolina basketball team. For the reprieve that it needed was handed, instead, to a team wearing unfriendly colors.
The hardship the men in Carolina blue endured, this time on the Pittsburgh hardwood, on which the Panthers didn't shoot the lights out so much as they obliterated them. They perpetrated a Valentine's Day massacre of their own, 89-76, on the sagging No. 12 Tar Heels, who have now lost three of their last four games.
It looked so effortless, Pittsburgh's throttling of UNC (18-7, 8-4 ACC). It began six seconds in with a stolen tip-off and runaway layup by guard Cameron Wright. It ended, in the final 14 seconds, with an uncontested rebound by guard Chris Jones. The bookends were rather tame for Pittsburgh (17-9, 6-6 ACC), at least relative to the bulldozing that it conducted in the intervening 39 minutes.
"They were so much more aggressive than us early, and so much more positive in everything they did," said Coach Roy Williams, who nearly snapped his glasses after yanking them from his face as he stormed off the court at halftime.
"That was our A-game," said junior guard Marcus Paige, who mustered just eight points in 32 minutes and made only one of the seven 3-pointers he hoisted. "We didn't bring ours, anywhere close to ours."
"They were making everything," said forward Brice Johnson.
It was hyperbole, yes, but it was slight. Pittsburgh made 64.9 percent of its shots Saturday, the highest shooting percentage that UNC has surrendered in 12 years under Williams. The game hadn't erased 90 seconds from the clock before the Panthers were up 8-0. They made each of the seven shots they took to start the second half: four jumpers, two layups, a 3-pointer, of which Pittsburgh sank eight in the game. It had the fewest turnovers, too, of any Williams-era UNC foe: a handful, exactly what the Panthers were Saturday to the Tar Heels .
Johnson led UNC with 19 points, but he could do little to deter Pittsburgh's big men. Forward Sheldon Jeter, making his second start of the season, scored a game-high 22 points on 10-for-14 shooting. UNC, at the end of a week that gave few answers to the vagaries of life, couldn't solve this latest quandary. Pittsburgh saw the basket and aimed, and rarely did it misfire.
"Early in the second half, I thought it was any man's ball game," said Williams, whose team trailed by 14 at the intermission. "And they make their first seven shots."
