THF has a post-mortem up about this season. Key line: “The team can’t shoot, can’t score, can’t defend, and doesn’t play with any urgency or fight.”

They’re about 75 percent percent right. UNC definitely can’t shoot. It can’t score. It does play with urgency and fight in some losses (Duke, BC, the Graves-led GT comeback), but it rolls over in others (Virginia, Maryland, the game at GT), and rolling over is something tired kids do in their seventh pick-up game of the day, not something D-I players do.

Defense, though, is not the culprit. Not the main one, anyway.

Here’s a quick chart:

This is, courtesy of John Gasaway at Basketball Prospectus, the breakdown of UNC’s performance in conference games this year and last year. For the uninitiated, “ppp” stands for “points per possession,” a stat that Dean Smith himself helped popularize. Pretty simple.

What to be gleaned here? UNC’s defense is, indeed, worse in conference games than it was last year; that .03 ppp is actually fairly significant, equating to about 2 extra points a game for opponents at UNC’s current 73-possession-per-game tempo.

But the defensive drop is nothing, and I mean nothing, compared to the disaster that is UNC’s offense.

In part, that’s because Carolina was a great offensive team last year — here I imagine Tom Izzo shaking his head and muttering to himself — and, therefore, this year’s team is trying to live up to the elite level of play of its predecessor. That is not enough, though, to explain the magnitude of the Heels’ offensive fall-off; they’ve gone, in one season, from being the best offensive team in the country to, at least in conference games, the worst offensive team in the ACC. The decline of 0.2 points per possession from last year is almost unfathomable; it adds up to about 15 points per game. (Perhaps UNC has missed an elite scoring big man more than people care to admit.)

UNC has at least made strides on defense recently, whether through actual improvement or through luck or a little of both. Three of UNC’s last four opponents, including Duke, have scored 1 point per possession or fewer. The offense, though, remains moribund.

All of this plays out when you look at other stats, too, besides efficiency. UNC is slightly worse this year than last year in opponents’ eFG% (a measure that takes the extra value of a 3-pointer into account). It’s slightly worse in giving up offensive rebounds to the other team. It’s substantially worse in forcing steals, but substantially better in blocking shots, and it actually forces more turnovers than it did last year.

The offensive stats, though, are ugly:

UNC’s shooting is way down from last year. It turns the ball over 21 times per 100 possessions, compared to 16.5 times last year (an extra 4 or so turnovers per game). It doesn’t get to the line quite as often (and that’s not a good thing, even if you’re Memphis-in-08 bad at the free throw line). It does rebound a little better thanks to Ed Davis, but when you’re turning it over so much and not shooting well, that hardly matters.

There’s going to be a lot of impugning this team’s defense as the season wraps up and people look to get in their two cents about what went wrong. And that’s fair enough; it’s hardly great.

But the numbers bear out what, I think, we all grasp watching the cames: It’s the offense that’s really been the culprit. Harrison Barnes and Reggie Bullock can’t come to Chapel Hill soon enough.