Davis, Brooks help No. 14 UNC top UNLV in relocated Maui Invitational
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — North Carolina started its first game of the relocated Maui Invitational so badly that it faced an immediate double-digit hole as its Hall of Fame coach benched multiple starters.
The 14th-ranked Tar Heels offered up a confidence-building response to those early troubles.
Freshman RJ Davis scored 16 points to help UNC beat UNLV 78-51 in Monday’s first round. After falling behind 13-0, the Tar Heels used a big run spanning halftime and a dominating effort on the glass to advance to a semifinal meeting with Stanford.
“I told them at the first timeout I wasn’t worried about the score,” coach Roy Williams said. “I was just worried about how we were playing.”
Garrison Brooks added 14 points and surpassed the 1,000-point mark for his career in the first half for the Tar Heels (2-0), who didn’t score for the first 6 1/2 minutes. But UNC closed the gap, then went on a 28-4 run for its own big lead.
The Tar Heels got a big contribution from senior reserve Andrew Platek, who had 11 points and hit a pair of first-half 3-pointers after UNC sputtered out of the tipoff.
“I think we were worried for a second,” Platek said of the players’ reaction to the early deficit. “But then we just knew if we played our principles and played our game plan, we were going to be fine.”
The Maui Invitational is being played in the North Carolina mountains instead of its traditional Hawaii setting due to the coronavirus pandemic. That gave the Tar Heels a home-state game, albeit with fan cutouts in the seats and pumped-in crowd noise, and brought Williams back to the city where he grew up.
Bryce Hamilton scored 15 points for the Runnin’ Rebels (0-2), who hit their first five shots. But UNLV made 13 of 57 shots (22.8 percent) while the Tar Heels snagged seemingly every miss to finish with a 54-35 rebounding advantage.
“As the game wore on, they picked up the pressure, brought some presses, some traps, denied entries more on the wings and we didn’t do the job we needed to do to be stubborn to get open,” UNLV coach T.J. Otzelberger said.