Game Preview: #6 UNC vs Robert Morris

North Carolina vs Robert Morris, 6:00 PM, ESPNU

The Tar Heels look to cap off a highly success weekend by UNC teams with a win over Northeast Conference foe Robert Morris. UNC comes into the game having dispatched NC Central 76-60 on Friday in a fairly uneven affair. The game ended up being very much a grind with the Eagles slowing the tempo and using a zone defense to frustrate the Tar Heels offensively. Robert Morris opened the season on Friday with a 77-50 loss to Lafeyette. In that game the Colonials shot just 8-50 from the floor including 5-22 from three.

Robert Morris lost several key players from a team that last season won 20 games and exited postseason play in the second round of the NIT. Gone to graduation are leading scorer Karvel Anderson who posted 19 ppg last season and hit 46% of his threes(119 made) last season. Filling in the void for the Colonials will be the second leading scorer from a year ago Lucky Jones. Jones averaged 13.8 points per contests in 2013-14 and was also the team's leading rebounder with 6.8 boards per game. Overall the Colonials have some size with five players in the 6-7 to 6-9 range. The problem for the Colonials is UNC starts four players in that range.

For UNC this is another game in the experimentation phase of the season. Roy Williams will use several lineup combinations and go very deep into his bench. This could result in some disrupted offensive flow since this team is still developing on-the-court chemistry and figuring out roles. Marcus Paige scored just eight points on Friday with NCCU employing defense focused on hampering the Iowa junior. This stage of the season would be a great time for UNC to explore both producing points in a balanced fashion and defeating defenses honed on Paige who is the best player the Tar Heels have. In addition to that normal monitoring of UNC's free throw and three point shooting applies. The free throw shooting on Friday was a decent 66% with Isaiah Hicks 2-7 hurting the overall average. UNC's 2-11 from three wasn't great but it will take a few games to fully know if the perimeter scoring will be a huge issues against this season or not.

UNC 89 RMU 62