When North Carolina held its first practice of the season Thursday, Brandon Robinson grew frustrated with the pace of the session. There was too much stoppage for instruction, he thought, and not enough working.
The senior guard had to remind himself of the obvious, though: six of the Tar Heels’ 17 players are new to the program. Fans got their first introduction to the fresh faces during Late Night with Roy on Friday night, and Robinson’s still in the early stages of getting to know some of his teammates, too.
“It’s a lot of teaching, a lot of slowing down,” he said after the event. “And I just want to keep going. But we’ve just gotta be patient with each other and keep getting better.”
Head coach Roy Williams expects all his newcomers to pick up the system quickly. But with the two graduate transfers — guard Christian Keeling and forward Justin Pierce — there is even more pressure to do so sooner rather than later.
Robinson said both Keeling and Pierce have been “picking up things fast,” and “are going to do some great things.”
“They’re both high-level basketball players, so I don’t expect them to be any different from where they came from,” he said.
Pierce, who played three seasons at William & Mary, doesn’t seem to lack confidence in making the jump from the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) to the ACC.
The 6-foot-7 forward averaged 14.9 points and 8.9 rebounds for the Tribe last season. He shot 41.6 percent from deep as a sophomore, but a broken wrist in the offseason hampered his shooting ability in 2018-19, when he shot 32.4 percent on 3-pointers.
"Ask any good shooter, to take three months off without shooting, it's really hard," Pierce said. "I get a lot of questions about that – why my percentages were down last year. But you can ask anyone on the team, I can shoot the ball."
