by Adam Lucas

CHARLOTTE—Desmond Hubert didn't smile. It was still a little too fresh in his mind—and elsewhere—to be funny.

The subject was a play at the end of the first half in Carolina's 90-72 win over Davidson on Saturday, a solid win over a quality team in a different environment, all of which will combine to help the Tar Heels as they prepare to travel to the Bahamas for the Battle 4 Atlantis.

The play started innocuously enough. The Wildcats had called a timeout with one minute left, a smart move that seemed to set them up to get two-for-one in a fairly tight game. But coming out of the timeout, Carolina played quality defense, denied any open looks around the three-point line, and the ball eventually trickled out of bounds with two seconds on the shot clock and 22.2 on the game clock.

With the ball in the corner on the baseline, a very difficult inbounding position, Roy Williams immediately put Hubert in the game to fill the John Henson condor role against 6-foot-0 Jack Gibbs trying to inbound the ball.

“It's a really tough angle,” Hubert said. “Especially with someone on the ball as long as I am, it cuts off their vision. You can't really throw it anywhere but straight ahead. The first time, he had nowhere to go with it…”

Unfortunately, Hubert was right. Gibbs had nowhere to go with it. And then he decided to go, well, off Hubert's “midsection.”

“Yeah,” a grim Hubert said. “That's one way to put it.”

After Gibbs threw it off Hubert to preserve the possession, the Wildcats substituted and used 6-foot-9 Oskar Michelsen as the inbounder. Carolina had forced them to gain some height, but the Wildcats lost some passing ability. With Hubert bouncing in front of him, Michelsen tried to squeeze a pass down the baseline, but Kennedy Meeks knocked it away.

At the same instant Meeks knocked it away, Justin Jackson saw what was happening and took off for the other end of the court. Meeks secured the ball and immediately fired an outlet pass the length of the floor, where Jackson gathered it and scored.

That's not necessarily the kind of recognition you would expect a freshman to have, but it hasn't taken Jackson long to learn the strengths of his teammates.

“With Kennedy, his outlet passes are some of the best in the country,” Jackson said. “When we know our bigs have the ball on a rebound, Coach tells us to run and they'll look for us. That's exactly what he did.”

The sequence was the perfect illustration of Carolina's depth. It might not be the most purely talented collection of players in the Williams era, but it's a collection that fits their roles very well. With J.P. Tokoto struggling to get in the flow early, the Tar Heels went to Theo Pinson, who promptly got a steal, block and score. Hubert stayed on his feet against a shot fake and then blocked a shot. Isaiah Hicks came off the bench and scored nine points to go with four rebounds and two blocks in 19 minutes. When Brice Johnson got in quick second half foul trouble, piling up four fouls in the final half, Hicks immediately contributed.

The sophomore has evolved into exactly what Williams always says he wants from his reserves—when he puts them in the game, he doesn't want a dropoff. Hicks maintains the energy created by the starters and looks very comfortable in the paint. He gives the Tar Heels a legitimate third post option in an era when some teams don't have one.

That size could have been a detriment against Davidson, which mostly prefers to stand around the perimeter and shoot three-pointers. But even with Jackson occasionally guarding 5-foot-11 Brian Sullivan (who scored 33 points in Chapel Hill last year but finished 2-for-10 on Saturday) or Gibbs (also 2-for-10), the Tar Heels defended the perimeter reasonably well, limiting the Wildcats to 11-for-36 from beyond the arc.

“I just tried to stay low,” Jackson said. “With me being taller, I play more straight up anyway. So I had to stay in a stance, and if I got switched onto a small guy, I had to stay on him.”

Carolina is 3-0, and Marcus Paige has yet to lead the team in scoring in any of those games. This time last year, Paige was on his way to becoming a star. This year, the Tar Heels are discovering they've got some options surrounding their star, which will eventually make him much more dangerous. He's taken ten fewer shots in the first three games of this year as opposed to last year, and he's played nearly 20 fewer minutes.

We'll know much more after the next three rapid-fire games. But three games into the season, it looks like the Tar Heels have some promising pieces.

“Our whole team is versatile,” Jackson said. “It doesn't matter what someone throws at us. We can figure it out and play the way we want to play.”