‘We’ve got to get better’: Brady Manek vents frustration as UNC takes care of UNC Asheville

CHAPEL HILL — At the end of an energy cycle, North Carolina had enough in the tank to take care of UNC Asheville.

Not that Brady Manek found it particularly satisfying.

Armando Bacot muscled in 22 points and the Tar Heels won 72-53 in men’s basketball Tuesday night at the Smith Center, capping their third game packed into a stretch of four days with a victory.

RJ Davis chipped in 12 points, Leaky Black provided nine points and 11 rebounds, and freshmen D’Marco Dunn and Dontrez Styles helped close out the final 65 seconds with their first buckets as college players.

Manek, the graduate transfer sharpshooter from Oklahoma, contributed eight points and nine rebounds. He had an ice pack strapped to his left shoulder when he sat down for a postgame session with reporters, and didn’t hold back in speaking up and venting frustration.

“We’ve got to get better, plain and simple,” he said. “I don’t know what it is, but we’ve got to play better. I don’t know if we’ve got to come together more, we’ve just got to play basketball, I don’t know. We’ve got to play better. We should’ve beat them by a lot more than what we did.”

North Carolina finished with more turnovers (18) than assists (15) on Tuesday night for the third straight game, and saw its sizeable lead shrink to a seven-point margin during the second half.

Jamon Battle supplied 19 points as the lone scorer in double digits for UNC Asheville of the Big South Conference, which has suffered blowout losses to Alabama-Birmingham (102-77) and Chattanooga (75-45) on the young season.

The Tar Heels built a 17-5 lead out of the gate and went ahead 35-15 during the game’s first 14½ minutes, a beatdown seeming imminent, before experiencing some lulls. When the visiting Bulldogs pulled within 45-38 in the second half, Bacot pumped in nine straight points for North Carolina to move the lead to 54-40.

“We’ve got to get out to an early lead and hold it,” Manek said. “We can’t let teams like that stick around.

“We got lit up this weekend and that was our third, fourth straight game where we were down at halftime. You can’t be down to teams like that, they’ll make you pay for it and they’ll keep you down. And to put that on tonight, we’ve got to be up more. We’ve got to put it on them more, and we’ve got to let them feel how we felt this last weekend. I don’t know how else to explain it. We’ve got to play better for 40 minutes, let alone the start of the game. We’ve got to play better the entire time.”

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The Tar Heels arrived off a winless weekend in the Hall of Fame Tip-off Tournament at the Mohegan Sun, falling to Purdue on Saturday and Tennessee on Sunday in a pair of high-profile, nationally relevant matchups. Those defeats, particularly the listless 89-72 loss to Tennessee, dropped North Carolina out of the Top 25 rankings when Monday’s new poll was released. The Tar Heels had been ranked No. 18.

Add in North Carolina’s road victory last week at rowdy College of Charleston, and the Tar Heels played their fourth game in eight days here at home against Asheville.

“We’ve got some amazing talent,” Manek said. “We’ve got some good players. We’ve got a lot of guys that know how to play basketball. We’ve got to play basketball.

“I mean, we’ve got four McDonald’s All-Americans. The most I’ve ever had on a team is one. You put four on a team, we should be really good, and we’re not showing it. So we’ve got to play better, we’ve got to play harder, we’ve got to play smarter, and we need to make up for what happened and keep moving forward.”

Here are more takeaways from Tuesday night in Chapel Hill:

Armando Bacot delivers down low

The power forward Bacot grabbed seven rebounds, finished 8-for-14 from the field, and produced his third 20-point outing of the season.

He took control for a stretch when UNC Asheville trimmed North Carolina’s lead to 45-38 with 12½ minutes remaining. Bacot’s nine straight points for the Tar Heels at that juncture started on a three-point play during which he powered through a foul by the Bulldogs’ Drew Pember, a moment that illustrated how the 6-foot-10 Bacot put his size and strength to work around the basket.

“This whole game I knew I had to come out and just be more aggressive and give that post option,” he said. “because I feel like if I can catch it in the post I can basically score on anybody. So this whole game I just wanted to assert my dominance. I’ve been shooting a pretty good percentage, so I guess when I get the ball good things happen for the most part. So that’s something that Coach (Davis) emphasized and the players, too. Just me getting the ball more and being even more aggressive.”

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‘We were dialed in defensively’

New North Carolina coach Hubert Davis left Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut on Sunday promising that changes would be forthcoming from the Tar Heels, as he assessed the substandard defense and lacking effort that turned his team’s loss to Tennessee into a rout.

Davis said Asheville’s 26.5-percent shooting from the field Tuesday night, bogged down by just 7-for-37 from beyond the 3-point arc, became a positive defensive step for the Tar Heels that had him “really encouraged.” Asheville’s shooting percentage marked the lowest by a North Carolina opponent in nine seasons, since Evansville shot 25.8-percent from the field in December 2012.

Both Purdue and Tennessee connected at better than 54 percent from the field during their wins over the Tar Heels, and those teams combined to pile up a glaring 96-40 advantage in points in the paint that buried North Carolina.

“We took offense to that,” Davis said Tuesday night. “We’re a much better defensive team than what we played against Purdue and Tennessee, and there were a lot of frustrated, upset, motivated guys in the locker room, and they responded on the defensive end. There was a stretch in the first half where I think we got seven stops in a row, and I was really excited and really happy for that. I thought we were dialed in defensively.”

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Tar Heels take a break from games

North Carolina now has a seven-day break in between games, with its next assignment a Dec. 1 visit from Michigan in the ACC-Big Ten Challenge. Four days later, the Tar Heels play their Atlantic Coast Conference opener at Georgia Tech.

“We’re going to spend time together as a team away from the court,” Davis said, “but we’re going to practice a lot and we’re going to get better. I don’t care what anybody says, I’m convinced this is a team that has a chance to win the national championship. I just believe that. They’re great kids, unbelievable kids to be around every day. They’re talented out there on the floor. And I’m excited about this week to get better as a team and to spend time together as a team. It’s hard to during the season with school and recruiting, and I can’t wait to get back to spending time together with the team away from the court.”

Adam Smith is a sports reporter for the Burlington Times-News and USA TODAY Network. You can reach him by email at asmith@thetimesnews.com or @adam_smithTN on Twitter.

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This article originally appeared on Times-News: UNC basketball: Brady Manek speaks out after win over UNC Asheville