LAHAINA, Hawaii — The smiling said it all.
To understand how Tuesday’s Maui Invitational semifinal went between No. 4 Auburn and No. 12 North Carolina, you needed to look no further than the teams’ two benches inside the Lahaina Civic Center.
On Auburn’s side? Joking, laughing, bench players practicing their best celebrations.
On North Carolina’s? Puckered lips, stoic stares — and by the end of Auburn’s eventual 85-72 win, hung heads.
A day after North Carolina completed an all-time comeback versus Dayton, the Tigers buried the Tar Heels so deep that UNC coach Hubert Davis’ team couldn’t muster similar magic. Instead, Bruce Pearl’s Auburn team beat its third top-12 opponent in its first six games — none of them at home — and advanced to face Memphis in the Maui Invitational championship game.
“Look, coaches can help win games,” Pearl said. “Players win championships.”
Leading the way, again, was All-American center Johni Broome, who had 18 first-half points before eventually finishing with a game-high 23, plus 19 boards.
“He dominated this entire game,” coach Davis said. “He was the best player on the floor, and I don’t think it was even close.”
Perhaps the game’s opening minutes, which were something straight out of North Carolina’s nightmares, were a sign of what was to come. This was always going to be a bad matchup for UNC — which starts three sub-6-foot-3 guards — considering Auburn’s size, but still. Auburn, largely behind Broome’s bruising efforts on the interior, jumped out to a 21-6 lead, looking every bit like the best team in the nation. Davis, meanwhile, did his best impression of Anger from “Inside Out,” practically blowing his top as the Tigers rebounded and scored at will over his tiny Tar Heels.
And it’s hard to blame him; Broome single-handedly outscored UNC for almost the first eight minutes, before a Ven-Allen Lubin layup finally gave the Tar Heels 12 to Broome’s then-11.
But that Lubin layup, while consequential in its own right, was also part of something much more important: UNC racing to its own 15-2 run, including 11 straight, most of which came in the teeth of the Tigers’ defense. (It should be noted that Broome was on the bench for a not-insignificant portion of North Carolina’s comeback.) The Tigers may have undeniably been the bigger team, with Broome a matchup-beater North Carolina couldn’t compete with, but also true? Auburn’s guards couldn’t keep up with UNC’s, especially breakout junior Seth Trimble, whose nine first-half points led UNC at the break.
In one way, advantage Auburn. In another, advantage UNC. And thus, a one-sided whooping turned into a track meet, with the Tigers clinging onto a 40-32 lead at the break.
But then the second half began … or at least it did for Auburn. Not so much for UNC. It was in many ways like the game’s opening minutes all over again, a horror track for the Tar Heels: Auburn on a 12-2 run, extending the lead to 18.
“Our guys stepped up their game,” Pearl said. “The start of the second half, for sure, but also (the) start of the game. Extremely well.”
UNC, of course, has been in this position before — twice, actually: at Kansas, back in the season’s opening week, and Monday, when it trailed Dayton by 21 before completing the largest comeback in school history since 1993.
The difference? Against Dayton, Davis’ team was able to slowly chip away at the lead, charting a comeback in four-minute chunks. But Auburn had an answer seemingly any time UNC strung together multiple possessions. Case in point: after the Tar Heels scored five straight midway through the half, and seemed to be stealing momentum, Auburn stole the ball from Trimble with 10:45 left and turned it into a Chaney Johnson dunk on the other end. Back to 16, and staring up at a seeming mountain.
“We had spurts, but nothing sustained on the defensive end,” Davis said. “For us to be good, we have to live and dwell in the trenches. What’s in the trenches are the loose balls, rebounds, setting screens, getting through screens, those toughness plays — Auburn won all of them the entire game. They were better than us.”
OH MYYYY🤯 pic.twitter.com/8lP4LXne0I
— Auburn Basketball (@AuburnMBB) November 27, 2024
And while Auburn let five UNC players score at least 10 points, it never let anyone in particular get hot. The proof? The Tar Heels didn’t have a single double-digit scorer for the first 30 minutes of the game, before Trimble (a team-high 17), RJ Davis, Elliot Cadeau, and Lubin all got there.
Ultimately, once Auburn scored early in the second half, UNC never got it closer than 10. The Tigers were simply too tall, too tough and too good.
And, truthfully, too deserving of playing in Wednesday’s final.
What went wrong for North Carolina, and what’s next?
After the offseason graduation of longtime center Armando Bacot, North Carolina’s bigs were always going to be its biggest question mark entering this season — but through six games now, the returns are not encouraging.
It’s probably unfair to call UNC’s frontcourt a fatal flaw, but it’s clear by now that UNC is going to struggle against every team it plays with a high-level center. That’s an issue that’s inherently going to cap this team’s ceiling, no matter how sensational its three guards are.
As respectfully as possible, Jalen Washington and Jae’Lyn Withers — UNC’s starting forwards — just had no shot against someone as good as Broome. He scored on the game’s first two possessions, setting the tone for what turned out to be a dominant effort.
And the worst part for UNC? Everyone — Auburn, North Carolina, analysts, fans — knew it was coming, and the Tar Heels offered as much resistance as tissue paper. Washington especially struggled, with just one made shot, two rebounds, two fouls, and three turnovers in 17 minutes of action. UNC got out-rebounded 42-36, although it felt like a much more dramatic gulf.
“I’ve said that it has nothing to do about physical size; it does (have to do) with the size of one’s heart,” Davis said. “We have to be able to rebound the basketball.”
The good news is that Trimble’s breakout is very real, and RJ Davis is still an All-American in his own right. When Cadeau is on, those three form as potent a perimeter trio as there is in the country, especially against other teams willing to run. But as Tuesday made clear, even if those three have strong nights, they can’t carry this team to wins against some of the nation’s best, which Auburn clearly is.
Considering the rest of the ACC has been so underwhelming so far this season, UNC should still be considered among the favorites, along with Duke … but at present, it’s hard to see the Tar Heels making too deep a long-term run with its current roster composition.
How did Auburn hold off a top-five offense?
You really can’t discount the size advantage Auburn had, but at the same time, reducing the Tigers’ defensive effort on Tuesday to simply “we were bigger than them” doesn’t do Auburn justice.
North Carolina, for example, entered the game with the fourth-lowest turnover rate in the country — and the Tigers forced the Tar Heels into a negative assist-to-turnover ratio, with 10 giveaways compared to just seven dimes. UNC had a top-30 free-throw rate and tried putting pressure on the rim, but it only had 13 free throws during its second-half comeback, missing five of them.
Perhaps most importantly, Davis’ team — which typically averages 93 points per game, which ranks in the 99th percentile nationally, per CBB Analytics — only mustered 72, by far its lowest output through six games.
“North Carolina is a great, great offensive team,” Pearl said, trying to be kind.
But against Auburn, it certainly didn’t look that way.
One name who probably doesn’t get enough credit for Auburn’s success is point guard Denver Jones, who took turns defending North Carolina’s various guards. He especially gave Cadeau — who missed 10 of his 15 shots — trouble, further limiting UNC’s offense by shutting off its water source of a point guard. Jones had four fouls, but also two steals, and turned his chest into a chain-link fence that UNC couldn’t penetrate.
“I tell you what: Denver Jones is one of the best defensive guards in college basketball. He is one of the reasons why our team has won the games that we have won,” Pearl said. “Nobody talks about it, writes about it. … I don’t know how many times RJ Davis scored on him, but not many.”
Required reading
(Photo: Darryl Oumi / Getty Images)
