Cole Anthony knows that UNC hasn’t had the most successful season so far, but he also knows that beating Duke can cure a lot of ills.

“We play well as a team this next game, people are going to forget about that last loss. They’re only going to worry about this game,” he said.

Anthony missed more than a month following a procedure on his knee. As a player expected to be selected in the lottery of the NBA Draft later this year, Anthony might have considered sitting out the rest of the year to make sure his knee was at 100 percent for the draft preparation process. Instead, he returned to the floor.

“I owed my brothers more,” he said. “I owed them way more than I’d left.”

Plus, sitting out would mean missing the Duke game.

“This is the biggest stage you could possibly be on in college basketball,” he said. “Who wouldn’t want to play on this?”

Despite the hype around the rivalry, he’s focused on the game plan.

“How can we win this game?” he said. “I don’t want to let my brothers down. I want to do everything I can.”

The team hasn’t discussed the rivalry among itself or what to expect in the first Duke game for many players on the roster.

“We haven’t really talked much about it,” he said. “We’ve really just been focused on us our team as a unit. We haven’t really been worried about everyone else. The more we just get in tune with ourselves, the better we’ll become.”

Anthony will be matched up against Duke point guard Tre Jones, but he hasn’t been focusing on Jones. “I have individually just been scouting the Duke team as a whole. They’re all threats, so we’re just doing all we can.”

Anthony didn’t follow the rivalry closely growing up. “Honestly, the only Duke-Carolina game I remember watching is the one I went to last year, when they played. Just seeing them win here, that was awesome. I wasn’t even playing, but I just felt in the game at that moment.”