Men’s Basketball: Panthers aim to leave stinging loss in past, face Tar Heels

Maybe Talib Zanna was just feeling laconic in the news conference immediately after Syracuse’s Tyler Ennis splashed in a winning, mid-court 3-pointer and lashed an ocular nightmare on the host players and fans.

But according to Zanna, Pitt head coach Jamie Dixon delivered a simple message to the team in preparation for its upcoming road bout with North Carolina.

“Just keep our heads up,” the fifth-year senior center said softly. “Don’t be down. Go home and relax. Come tomorrow, ready for practice and ready for Saturday.”

It might not be that easy, Lamar Patterson indicated, sitting alongside Zanna.

“It’s tough on the team, but you can’t be too down on yourself.  They got a win by hitting a 50-footer,” Patterson said. “There’s not much you can do about that, it was just meant for them to win. I’m proud of these guys, we battled and we out rebounded them by a lot. It’s something to move forward with.”

Saturday brings another challenge, one less arduous than the No. 1-ranked team, as the Panthers face North Carolina at the Dean Smith Center in Chapel Hill, N.C., at 1 p.m. And, as Patterson mentioned, the rebounding edge Pitt walked away with is a key moving forward, especially facing the Tar Heels.

North Carolina (16-7, 6-4 ACC) entered the year as the 12th-ranked team in the Associated Press preseason poll, then promptly dropped its third game of the campaign against a tough, but unranked Belmont team of the Ohio Valley conference.

The Tar Heels’ leading scorer from the previous season, P.J. Hairston, missed the first 10 games of the current campaign amid a joint school and NCAA investigation into his receipt of impermissible benefits,” as Andrew Carter of the News Observer described it. The university ultimately decided against reinstating Hairston.

Even the always-anticipated “Tobacco Road” affair with Duke, which was scheduled the same night Pitt fell to Syracuse, was postponed because of inclement weather.

But if anything has gone right for North Carolina this season, it has happened after a missed shot. 

The Tar Heels rank eighth in the country in rebounding, hauling in 41.1 boards per contest. Conversely, the Panthers (20-5, 8-4 ACC) average 36.5 per game, which leaves them with just the 110th-highest total in the nation.

Junior forward James Michael McAdoo leads North Carolina with 6.8 rebounds per game, which isn’t a jaw-dropping figure, but the team’s strength lies in its depth. Kennedy Meeks and Brice Johnson register 6.2 boards apiece and J.P. Tokoto corrals 5.8 on average.

Talib Zanna, at 7.9 rebounds a game, is the only Panther above an average of six. 

Even sophomore Marcus Paige, the Tar Heels’ floor general, averages 3.5 boards per contest. Paige is also the team’s leading scorer at 17 points per game and top assister — on a team that distributes well — at 4.6 dishes per game. McAdoo averages 15 points. 

Although they’ve fallen out of the top-25, the Tar Heels have losses against Syracuse and Virginia — two results the Panthers have experienced. But North Carolina has also slipped against weaker ACC squads, dropping a game at Wake Forest and one at home against Miami.

North Carolina’s conference defeats haven’t come like the Panthers’ most recent, which begs the question for the visitors.

Is it that easy, to look forward to the Dean Smith Center and not back at Wednesday? To block out the those final 4.4 seconds that clamped a stranglehold on dreams of upsetting No. 1?

Maybe Dixon’s body language said as much in his news conference, moments after telling his players to simply look forward. Dixon stayed hunched over in his nearly 11-minute conference. His back was just bent, so maybe the result wasn’t completely back-breaking. 

Or maybe the loss wasn’t even a dent in the Panthers’ confidence. At least, Patterson doesn’t think so.

“I don’t think our confidence ever went anywhere,” he said. “We’ll be fine. The season isn’t over. We have more games ahead of us.”