WINSTON-SALEM— In a game where seemingly everyone in light blue had a hot hand, only one Tar Heel approached perfection.
In a 95-57 win at Wake Forest on Saturday, the No. 8 North Carolina men’s basketball team shot 62.3 percent from the field, and made 16 of 25 3-point attempts. The team jumped out to an 18-0 lead against the Demon Deacons and never looked back, receiving scoring contributions from thirteen different Tar Heels in a wire-to-wire win.
Pick your adjective: hot, blistering, otherworldly. UNC was all of those, and then some.
But it was Cameron Johnson who played himself into rarified air. The graduate guard sank his first eight shots en route to a game-high 27 points on 10-13 from the field and 7-10 from 3-point range, and played a first half that, if it weren’t for a lone turnover, could be called perfect.
His stat line at the break: 14 points, 5-5 from the field, 4-4 from 3-point range, three rebounds, and three assists. At that point, the score of the game read like a football blowout: 49-21, UNC.
Yet in Johnson’s mind, the work was far from over.
“It takes a little extra effort to come out and try to up what you did in the first half,” Johnson said. “It’s really easy to come out like, ‘We’re playing fine, we don’t need to play hard,’ but I think all five of us decided in our head and amongst each other that we’re going to keep going.”
Johnson kept going, all right. His flawless shooting performance continued into the second half, when at one point he was 8-8 from the field, with six of those coming from deep.
“I don't know how many threes I had in the first half, but they all went down,” Johnson said. “I felt like, you know, I really had to focus on those. When I came out of halftime, and I was shooting threes, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a little easier than some other days have been.’ It just kind of happens in the course of the game.”
