Scoring droughts doom UNC men's basketball against Wake Forest

WINSTON-SALEM — Elliot Cadeau drew a triple team at the top of the key five minutes into the second half.

The sophomore guard dished it underneath to junior forward Ven-Allen Lubin, who was all alone in the paint for a two-handed slam.

But for the next six minutes, the Tar Heels didn’t score again. Wake Forest went on a 12-0 run, building up to a 49-39 lead. 

“I don’t think the offense was stagnant,” head coach Hubert Davis said. “We had some open shots and we had some good looks.”

North Carolina fell to Wake Forest, 67-66, on Tuesday night at Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum. It’s UNC's second consecutive loss and extends the program's losing streak in Winston-Salem to four games, with the last win coming in 2019. Against the Demon Deacons, offensive lulls plagued the Tar Heels through key stretches. North Carolina shot 36 percent from the field in the first half. The Tar Heels made just 25 percent of their outside shots and didn’t attempt a single free throw in the second half. 

While Hubert Davis was adamant that his team’s offense didn’t struggle, UNC experienced multiple scoring droughts in both halves. North Carolina didn’t score for two or more minutes four times in the first half alone.

Cadeau was the lone bright spot in the first half. He tallied 10 points within two minutes to give UNC an early 16-7 lead. But any offensive rhythm halted there. 

“It’s pretty frustrating,” Cadeau said. “But we’re gonna have nights like this sometimes, and we just gotta push through it when the shots aren’t falling.”

Cadeau pointed to a similar aspect of North Carolina’s offense that has struggled in the past two games: layups. 

In the team's matchup with Stanford, UNC wasn’t aggressive enough in the paint. Against Wake Forest, the attempts were there, but the Tar Heels just didn’t convert. UNC made eight layups on 21 attempts.

“We just have to be better at the rim, from the guards to the bigs,” graduate guard RJ Davis said. “Because we’re capable of doing that [with] regards to the bigs we have. We have a lot of talented players that are able to do that.”

North Carolina’s most recent offensive performances have seemingly followed suit with first-year guard Ian Jackson’s . In UNC’s four-game win streak against Notre Dame, SMU, N.C. State and California, Jackson scored more than 20 points in every game except SMU — where he scored 18.

In the loss to Stanford, Jackson scored only six points and went 1-8 from the field. Then, Tuesday night against the Demon Deacons, it was a similar story.

Jackson shot just 3-11 from the field, including 1-7 from beyond the arc, scoring just seven points. In the second half, he missed on all three of his attempts — all from behind the arc. 

“It happened in the last game, it happened in this game,” Jackson said. “Just missing shots, that’s basketball.”

His offensive struggles were echoed by the rest of the Tar Heels with the team experiencing two major scoring droughts. Those scoring difficulties led to 12 and seven point runs from Wake Forest. The second run from the Demon Deacons effectively put the game away before UNC scored again with just 38 seconds on the clock. 

The Tar Heels weren't able to come back. They added another Quad 1 loss to their record.

And when it seems all messages are failing, RJ Davis offered a simple one to fix the offensive struggle.

“Continue to keep shooting.”

It's all one can offer when there seems to be no answers. 

@mdmaynard74

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