WASHINGTON — The drought is over after 37 long years. The “Cardiac Pack” are alive and well, and they’ll keep dancing into the NCAA Tournament.
DJ Horne scored 29 points as North Carolina State, seeded 10th, pulled off its improbable fifth victory in five days on Saturday night, beating top-seeded North Carolina 84-76 to win the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament for the first time since 1987.
“I’m emotional. I’m proud. I’m excited. Our players deserve this,” Wolfpack coach Kevin Keatts said Saturday. “These guys and the other guys in the locker room, they do all the heavy lifting. I just try to orchestrate stuff, put them in the right spots, but they have done a great job. This says a lot. We’ve been getting crushed — when I say we, NC State — by not delivering any championship in 37 years. Well, they can’t say that now because we got one tonight.”
For North Carolina (27-7) — ranked No. 4 in the AP poll — the loss snapped an eight-game winning streak.
The play of DJ Burns Jr., who had 20 points and a career-high-tying seven assists, also helped power the Wolfpack (22-14). North Carolina State is the lowest-seeded team to ever win the conference tournament. In addition to the performances of Horne and Burns, Mohamed Diarra had a game-high 14 rebounds and 11 points, while Michael O’Connell chipped in 10 points.
North Carolina was aiming for its first ACC postseason title since 2016 and was looking to potentially seal up a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. What hurt the Tar Heels was their defense, as they allowed North Carolina State to shoot 54.9 percent from the floor, the third-highest mark North Carolina has allowed to an opponent all season.
“We just couldn’t guard them tonight,” Tar Heels coach Hubert Davis said following the game. “We weren’t able to guard them one-on-one, whether it was on the post, isolations out on the wing. Didn’t play the type of defense that you have to have in order to win games like this.”
While RJ Davis — the ACC Player of the Year — and Armando Bacot stuffed the stat sheet for North Carolina, only one other Tar Heel scored in double figures. Davis finished with 30 points on 10-of-26 shooting while Bacot had 18 points and 12 rebounds. Harrison Ingram added 10 points.
Much of the game centered around an old-school battle in the post between Burns and Bacot, but North Carolina State knocked down a trio of 3-pointers in the opening five minutes of the game to jump out to a 14-4 lead.
North Carolina battled back behind the play of Davis, whose 3-pointer at the 6:46 mark of the first half tied the game at 28-28. Cormac Ryan’s 3-pointer with two seconds to go in the first half gave the Tar Heels a one-point advantage, 40-39, at the break.
The Wolfpack played through Burns for much of the first half, giving him plenty of touches in the paint. The imposing forward either bulldozed his way to the basket or passed out to an open shooter when double-teamed. He finished the first half with 11 points on 5-of-7 shooting to go with six assists.
“I just allowed him to catch the ball where he really wanted to,” Bacot said of defending Burns. “When he gets it at that point, it’s really tough to guard him.”
North Carolina State snatched the lead back in the second half. With 7:04 to play, Horne was fouled as he sank a layup, and he let out a scream, flexed and high-fived Wolfpack fans sitting courtside before swishing a free throw to push his team’s advantage to eight points. Horne — who fouled out with 1:17 to play — scored 16 points in the second half and went 9-for-11 from the free-throw line after intermission.
“We came into this tournament knowing that our season was on the line, so there was no room for mistakes,” Horne said. “I think everybody really took heed to that and took it personally.”
With less than a minute to play, two free throws from Diarra pushed North Carolina State’s lead to 12 points, its largest advantage of the game.
This was the seventh time that North Carolina and North Carolina State met in the ACC tournament championship, where the Tar Heels are now 4-3 against the Wolfpack. The tournament will change next year when Stanford, Cal and SMU join the league, and the teams that finish in the bottom three of the regular-season standings will be excluded from the field.
For now, the Wolfpack and Tar Heels will focus on rest ahead of Selection Sunday.
Burns, in his final statement of the postgame press conference said, “I will say, my legs hurt right now.”
–Mitchell Northam, Field Level Media
