Syracuse (19-10, 9-7 Atlantic Coast) travels to Chapel Hill on Monday for its second and final matchup with No. 7 North Carolina (23-6, 12-4) during the regular season. The Orange is coming off a victory in a must-win game over North Carolina State on Saturday, when Michael Gbinije scored a career-high 34 points to lead the charge in his final home game. A win against the Tar Heels all but secures an NCAA Tournament spot for the Orange.

Here’s everything you need to know about the team SU is going up against.

All-time series: Monday will mark the 11th all-time meeting for UNC and Syracuse. The Tar Heels have a 6-4 advantage in the first 10 games.

Last time they played: Syracuse was 0-3 in conference play when UNC came to the Dome on Jan. 9. Jim Boeheim had just finished a nine-game suspension and SU was playing its worst basketball of the year.

But for the first 35 minutes, SU hung tough against the top competition, before running out of gas in the 84-73 loss. Isaiah Hicks scored 21 points for UNC to lead four players in double-figure scoring. He scored 11 of those points at the line. Trevor Cooney had a season-high 27 points while Gbinije was 0-of-6 from 3 with just 10 points. The Orange was outscored 46-26 in the paint.

“We just want to win, period, at this point,” Gbinije said after the game. “Having these back-to-back losses, it’s not a fun environment to be in. It hits us … We talk about it a lot.”

The North Carolina report: The Tar Heels are one of the nation’s best. Their best showing of the season came just more than a week ago, when they routed No. 12 Miami, 96-71 to rebound from a gut-wrenching home loss to Duke a couple days before. UNC has struggled, though, going up against the nation’s other elite teams. Despite a win over Maryland earlier in the season, UNC has dropped games at Texas, at Louisville, at Notre Dame, at Virginia and the aforementioned Duke loss. Signature wins are certainly lacking from UNC’s resume. It also has one bad loss, on the road early in the year against Northern Iowa.

UNC still has the fifth-best offensive efficiency in Division I, per Kenpom.com, collects offensive rebounds at a prodigious rate, and dominates the painted area better than pretty much any other team in the country. Brice Johnson is one of the nation’s best players, averaging nearly 17 points and more than 10 rebounds per game. UNC has basically five players scoring in double-figures (Kennedy Meeks averages 9.9), and can come after SU in a lot of ways.

 

Courtesy of Catherine Hemmer | The Daily Tar Heel

 

How Syracuse beats North Carolina: The Orange has to keep North Carolina out of the high post. In the last matchup, SU did a good job forcing UNC to take 3-pointers, something the Tar Heels would really prefer not to do. The Orange should look for a repeat performance in the that area. In January, UNC had six dunks, many of which came on feeds from the high post. The Tar Heels also connected on 12 of their final 13 attempts. Preventing high percentage looks and forcing UNC into taking 3s would be SU’s best bet. It would also behoove SU to get Tyler Roberson going. The big man has been struggling on the glass and in the paint offensively, and with a team like UNC that focuses so much of its game in that area, Roberson needs to be plugged in for the Orange to have a sniff at upsetting the superior Heels.

Stat to know: Much of UNC’s greatest strength is its ability to dictate tempo on both ends of the court. On offense, the Tar Heels use an average of just 15 seconds on the shot clock, good for 10th in Division I. But when the other team gets the ball, it uses 18.5 seconds of the clock, which is 339th in Division I. Syracuse forces teams to play slowly as well, so it will be interesting to see if UNC forces the Orange to play its brand of basketball.

Player to watch: Hicks put together a very strong performance against Syracuse about seven weeks ago, scoring 12 points over his season average. He’ll be the player SU has to keep an eye on this time around, as he was able to get to the foul line at will, and put points up on the board that way. Of course there is still Meeks and Johnson to keep an eye on, but Hicks was sneaky good against the Orange before and it cost SU.

Published on February 28, 2016 at 1:28 pm