Game time: 8 p.m.
TV: Raycom
Vegas line: Carolina -4
Pomeroy line: Carolina -5

Last time: UNC has yet to play Miami this year. The most recent scrum, last February, was one of those “good team makes it interesting just to give you a heart attack” games; Carolina won 69-65 in Coral Gables after being up by double digits in the second half. Ty Lawson scored Carolina’s last 11 points, including the game-clinching 3 with 13 seconds left; Tyler Hansbrough took a good ol’ white-boy charge with 45 seconds left and Carolina up 64-63. (That is what happens when Brian Asbury is handling the ball in the last minute of a close game. Good one, Frank Haith.)

Stuff to watch

Fun fact that might interest nobody else: UNC is No. 57 in the Pomeroy ratings. Miami is No. 58.

From way downtown: Many teams in the ACC this year feature elite defenses but kinda crummy offenses. Carolina has an OK defense and a bad offense. Miami, on the other hand, has an OK offense and a bad defense. The ‘Canes offense is led by a deluge of 3-point shooters — including an intriguing player, senior Adrian Thomas, who you may remember from past games against the U as “that guy who only shoots threes.” Thomas is one of the most efficient scorers in the country, posting an offensive rating of 122.1, but he uses only 15% of Miami’s possessions; the reason the former number is so high and the latter so low is that Thomas has attempted 134 threes this year (making 42.5) and just 20 twos. He’s an all-or nothing guy. Senior James Dews is more of a dual threat, a 40% 3-baller who’s taken the most shots on the team. There’s also Malcolm Grant, a 42.7% three-point shooter who, weirdly, shoots only 36.4% from two. Then, of course, there’s big guy Dwayne Collins, a high-usage player shooting over 60 percent from inside the arc. Miami isn’t adept enough on defense to shut down Carolina — and how sad is that, really? — so shutting down two or three of those guys would go a long way toward getting the Heels a W.

The bottom line

There’s a lot of optimism in Chapel Hill these days after the Wake Forest win, but people need to remember that a team is more than the last game it’s played — especially when that game featured some horrendous shooting from the other team. That’s not to say Carolina shouldn’t win this game; it’s Senior Night, Miami’s 0-7 on the road in the league, and UNC can clinch an NIT berth with a victory. But these are two very evenly matched, kinda lousy teams, with UNC having the advantage only because the game’s at home. Hope, and expect, to win; just don’t go marking it down in the books as a guaranteed W.

Game Time: 2 p.m.
TV: CBS
Consensus Vegas line: Wake Forest -7
Pomeroy line: Wake Forest -8

Last time out

Wake won at the Dome, 82-69. Carolina actually took care of the ball — turning it over on 13.4% of possessions, well below the Statsheet-given season average of 21.2% — but nobody on the team could buy a shot, as the Heels had an ugly, ugly effective field-goal percentage of 40.8 (which, sadly, is hardly the worst of the season; that dubious honor goes to the Georgia Tech rematch, which saw the Heels’ eFG% at 34.8).

Wake, meanwhile, went 9-16 from three, with freshmen Ari Stewart and C.J. Harris combining to go 7-11. Even Ish Smith, who for all of his talents is hardly an efficient scorer, went 9-17. In sum, they shot well. Carolina didn’t. Carolina got spanked.

Stuff to watch

Tyler Zeller: The man-love we gave Z as our first real post here was a horrible idea. We jinxed the hell out of him. We’re real sorry. Problem is, with Travis Wear likely out, his bro already on the shelf and Ed Davis out for the season, Zeller needs to figure out a way to break that jinx — and fast.

Unfortunately, he’s been flat-out lousy in his first two games back. Zeller at least got to the line in the Boston College game, putting up a respectable line of 9 points and 7 boards in 16 minutes, but his 2-9 shooting did UNC no favors. Against FSU, he was miserable (as was, to be fair, everyone on the Heels’ front line sans John Henson). He looks tentative, and while you expect Zeller to look tentative, you also expect him to score at a highly efficient rate. It’s a small sample size, sure, but that hasn’t happened since Z’s return. If UNC can’t get anything out of him, it’s going to be hard for the team to find offense against a pretty good (No. 21 in Pomeroy) Wake Forest D.

Interior defense: Despite the treys they were dropping against UNC in Chapel Hill, Wake Forest is a bad shooting team, ranking 184th in the country with an eFG% of 48.5. And that makes sense. Wake is one of the most interior-oriented teams in the country thanks to Smith’s constant penetration and Al-Farouq Aminu‘s general awesomeness. The Deacs get just 17.3 percent of their points from threes, ranking them in the bottom 10 in Division I in that category.

That’s what Wake wants to do. Go inside, where Aminu, Smith and maybe even (shudder) Chas McFarland will be able to eat up Deon & Co.

UNC needs to do a good job of denying the post, limiting Smith’s penetration (and being willing to double down on him and give Wake some looks; despite what happened against FSU, the stats bear this out) and forcing Wake to take jump shots. I’ve seen nothing that suggests that the Heels can do that, but check out how many threes Wake shot in this game, or this game, or this game, and ask yourself, what would I do if I were drawing up this defensive gameplan? What happened in Chapel Hill was the exception rather than the rule.

Turnovers: One thing that was not an exception to the rule was Wake’s inability to turn UNC over in Chapel Hill. The team’s defense is predicated on using its quick guards and interior size to contest every shot, not on pressuring.

Of course, that won’t stop Wake from going on a huge run; after all, that’s what happened in the last game, thanks to a simple formula of UNC missing shots + UNC not rebounding = Wake going on a second-half surge.

But the unlikeliness that Wake will bury a turnover-prone Carolina team with takeaways is still a good thing for the Heels. The only thing that rattles those kids worse than missing a bunch of shots is never getting the shots off at all.

The verdict

Do you feel good about Carolina’s chances to win this game? Of course you don’t. Neither do I.

But if Wake has a bad shooting day, hardly outside the realm of possibility, you never know. Go Heels.

Game Time: 7 p.m.
TV: ESPN
Consensus Vegas Line: FSU -2
Pomeroy Line: FSU -2 (UNC given 41% chance to win)

Stuff to Watch

A race to 60 points?: UNC has played 11 games against teams ranked in the top 20 in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency. Here is a chart of the team’s offensive efficiency in those games:

Six times in those 11 games, Carolina has failed to break 1 point per possession, sometimes laughably. Three other times, they were right at, or near, the 1 ppp mark. So in only two games (the Virginia Tech home game, perhaps the team’s second best all year behind the by-now-ritualistic beatdown of MSU, and the Ohio State game) was the offense really clicking.

Florida State is ranked No. 2 in the entire country in defensive efficiency, led by their interior defense, which is incredible. Teams shoot 39 percent against FSU on their two-pointers; 7-1 Solomon Alabi blocks 10.5 percent of all shots, while 6-9 Chris Singleton gets 5.8 percent and 6-11 freshman Xavier Gibson gets 7.2 percent (though he doesn’t play too much, in part because Leonard Hamilton likes designated UNC injurer/senior Ryan Reid and in part because Gibson is quite foul-prone).

FSU can be had from 3 (opponents shoot 33% against them, which isn’t a great percentage), but that would require Carolina having someone who could take advantage. There’s always the chance that Will Graves has a hot game, but we can’t rely on that. I’d like to see Larry Drew putting up some bombs against this D, too.

So it could get ugly.

On the other hand, Florida State’s offense isn’t great, either. They’ve been better than UNC in conference games, but worse over the course of the season. Worse! Than Carolina! Yeah, it’s because UNC played well at the start of the year, but sheesh. Alabi (114.6 ORtg, 22% possessions) is the only consistent source of offense; Singleton and freshman G Michael Snaer are the team’s second- and third-leading scorers, but they’re highly inefficient players. Deividas Dulkys (114.3 ORtg, 17.4% possessions) can score a bit, and he’s the team’s best weapon from 3 (39.4% on the season).

Clang!: Carolina shoots 65.6% on free throws. FSU is worse, shooting 64.9%. Odds are decent that you will be witnessing a startling display of ineptitude.

Incredibly, there are two teams in the ACC — Miami (64.7%) and Georgia Tech (64.3%) — that are worse.

Will Ryan Reid hurt somebody?: This has nothing to do with tempo-free stats but, damn, do I hate that kid. It’s almost an inevitability that he jacks someone given everything that’s happened this season, isn’t it? Look for Reid to do his best to end Deon Thompson‘s career. I hope the Dome rains down its hate on him.

The verdict

The tempo-free stats and the oddsmakers both seem to think Carolina has an okay chance, and — I hope — the crowd will really be into this one tonight, desperately seeking a W. And, though this goes against every rule of heeding sample size, I will point out that UNC played well in its last two home games (the Duke loss, the State win) and that the D has shored itself up a little in over the last four games (though it slipped some, especially in the second half, against a hot-shooting BC team, so who knows).

Still, FSU is more talented and absolutely dominant inside — and unless Carolina can hit a few shots to open things up, Deon, Tyler Zeller, John Henson and Travis Wear aren’t going to have any room at all to operate. Ultimately, I expect that to decide the game. Don’t have a good feeling about this one.

(No formal predictions here on Heels Geek. Always seemed silly to guess the score of a game.)