WASHINGTON — With a little over four minutes left in the ACC tournament semifinal, Pittsburgh's Jaland Lowe tied up the game with a jumper. UNC’s RJ Davis responded twenty seconds later with a downtown three.
The contest against the Pittsburgh Panthers was characterized by a tight back and forth play. UNC took the lead four times, Pitt three. The game was tied nine different times.
The No. 4 UNC men’s basketball team (27-6, 17-3 ACC) beat Pittsburgh (22-11, 12-8 ACC), 72-65, to advance to the ACC tournament championship on Saturday night.
After a relatively docile first half, RJ Davis hit his stride in the second and led the Tar Heels with 25 points.
“That’s a bad boy,” junior Harrison Ingram said. “The size [RJ Davis] is at, to shoot the ball like he does, I mean he gets open whenever he wants at will. When he shoots a shot, everyone thinks it’s going in.”
Graduate Armando Bacot was right behind with 19 points and 11 rebounds. UNC overall had another dominant performance off the glass with 44 rebounds.
Pitt won the opening tip, but seemed to give in to the high octane Tar Heel offense that previously crushed the Florida State Seminoles by a 25-point margin. However, four minutes into the contest, the Panthers came back with a renewed vigor, scoring 13 unanswered points in two minutes as the Tar Heels struggled to shut down Pitt’s Guillermo Diaz Graham beyond the arc.
The Tar Heels started slowly crawling back with jumpers from Davis and a three from sophomore Seth Trimble — his first since the Boston College victory in late January.
Still, with six minutes left in the half, UNC found itself down, failing to contain Pitt rookie Carlton Carrington. On the back of a dunk by Bacot and the offensive rebounding persistence of junior Harrison Ingram, the Tar Heels equalized, just for Carrington to drain another pull-up jumper.