Carolina Basketball's Best of the Decade: Top Five Games

It wasn't easy to choose five games from a decade of winning.

The 2010s have come to an end.

With that, let’s take a look at the five best games (read: wins) by the Tar Heels from 2010-19:

5. North Carolina 85, NC State 84 (OT) — Feb. 26, 2014

Marcus Paige simply went off. The Tar Heels and Wolfpack were tied 71-71 at the end of regulation. In overtime, Paige scored 10 points, including the final two of the game on a coast-to-coast layup with less than a second remaining.

Paige scored 35 points, making 11 of 21 shots from the floor and 7 of 12 3-pointers.

4. North Carolina 61, Virginia 57 — March 12, 2016

This was the Tar Heels’ only ACC Tournament championship of the decade. UNC used a stellar performance on the defensive end to hold Virginia without a field goal for more than eight minutes in the second half. The Tar Heels went on a 15-2 run and led 55-46 with less than two minutes left in the game.

Three players from UNC finished with more than 10 points — Joel Berry II (19), Marcus Paige (13) and Brice Johnson (12). Johnson also had a team-high nine rebounds.

3. North Carolina vs. Duke, all three meetings — 2019

Admittedly, there is recency bias with this selection, but it’s also tough to debate. Where do you even begin with these? The Tar Heels won the two regular-season games before losing to the Blue Devils in the semifinal of the ACC Tournament. Anyway, here we go:

• UNC won the first game by 16 points (and Zion Williamson’s shoe exploded, but that’s a secondary storyline) in one of the most-hyped games in the series. Luke Maye finished with 30 points and 15 rebounds for the Tar Heels, who never trailed that night at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
• The second game could be called The Coby White Show. Greenfield Coby was cookin' in the second half, either scoring or assisting on 17 points during an explosive 20-8 run that essentially sealed the win in the regular-season finale at a rocking Smith Center.
• The third game turned out to be a reminder of how spoiled college basketball fans can be at times. It was a nail biter the whole way through. Sure, the Tar Heels came out on the losing end, but the quality of the game cannot be debated. UNC led by 13 points in the first half, but the teams were tied 44-44 at the start of the second half.

2. North Carolina 75, Kentucky 73 — March 26, 2017

In case you aren’t familiar: the former walk-on and son of former UNC quarterback Mark Maye took a handoff from Theo Pinson and nailed a 19-foot, game-winning jump shot from the left wing to send the Tar Heels to the Final Four.

UNC was ahead 71-64 with less than a minute left. Then it got crazy. Both De’Aaron Fox and Malik Monk make 3-pointers in the span of 14 seconds to cut the Tar Heels’ lead to 71-70. A Justin Jackson layup with 34 seconds left extends UNC’s lead to 73-70. Monk hits another 3-pointer, which ties the game at 73 with 10 seconds left. That whole back-and-forth set up the heroic shot by Maye.

Maye came off the bench and contributed 17 points to the victory. Justin Jackson finished with a game-high 19 points, and Kennedy Meeks had 17 rebounds.

1. North Carolina 71, Gonzaga 65 — April 3, 2017

An easy choice to end with. The Tar Heels got their redemption a year after losing at the last second the year before against Villanova. We won’t talk about that, though. This is all about winning it all.

Before going into the game against Gonzaga, a word on Kennedy Meeks: Joel Berry II was the Most Outstanding Player at that year’s Final Four, but Meeks also deserved the award. Against Oregon in the semifinal, Meeks scored 25 points and had 17 rebounds, including one with 4 seconds left that saved the win off a missed free throw by Berry, to get the Tar Heels to the title game. He then blocked a shot by Gonzaga’s Nigel Williams-Goss with 15 seconds left in the title game — a play that led to a championship-sealing lay-up by Justin Jackson.

Back to the title game: Berry made four 3-pointers — the team’s only made 3-pointers that night, by the way — and finished with 22 points to lead the Tar Heels to their third national championship under Roy Williams.

The Tar Heels’ largest lead of the night was six points, and that was when the clock was at zero and the confetti was falling.