Carolina 67, Wake Forest 73

Wow, Carolina absolutely did not show up to to play tonight. That was some of the most painful basketball I have ever seen.

Still, they got fired up late, and were on a roll, when Cavanaugh basically assaulted Leslie McDonald going for a loose ball. First he flopped hard on top of him, then he grabbed his arms and basically started wrestling him instead of going for the ball. Instead of assessing a foul to Wake, however, the officials called a questionable elbow against L-Mac. A terrible, terrible, terrible call. Completely inexcusable. Broke the momentum of the run, and gave Wake two shots and the ball. Carolina then promptly went to sleep again. They woke up, however, with about three minutes left, and, if not for some bad bounces, would have tied it. But they didn't, and that was that. First loss to Wake in four years. Neither team played well, but Carolina played worse, and that's that.

So now we have, as you know, beaten the top three teams in the preseason poll, but lost to four unranked teams.

It's a young team, and, of course, we lost our best scorer forever...  And they really did show flashes of awesomeness... But mostly, they just played really badly tonight. Some bad officiating didn't help, but, aside from the infuriating no-call against Cavanaugh, which was huge, probably didn't matter all that much.

Ah well. On to Miami...