Notre Dame couldn’t even keep it close.
The Irish never led in Wednesday’s 76-56 loss to North Carolina in the second round of the ACC Tournament, trailed by as many as 24 points and faced a deficit of at least 10 points for the final 27 minutes of the game.
The loss fittingly represented a men’s basketball season that didn’t come close to reaching expectations at Notre Dame (15-18). Playing against the fifth-seeded Tar Heels, who entered the week considered by some as a bubble team for the NCAA Tournament, the Irish didn’t look like a threat to compete.
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Injuries became a story line for the Irish in the sixth game of the season when star guard Markus Burton went down with a right knee injury that kept him sidelined for the seven games. But his return in January wasn’t enough to salvage a disappointing season.
The Irish played Tuesday without two of its primary starters this season: guard Braeden Shrewsberry, who was declared out for the season Feb. 26 with a lower abdomen strain, and forward Kebba Njie, who missed the last two games in concussion protocol from a blow to the head in the regular season finale against California on Saturday.
Even if the Irish weren’t coming off a four-overtime victory over the Bears that physically exhausted the team, a run through the ACC Tournament to earn a surprise victory to the Big Dance never seemed possible. In what’s considered a down year for the ACC, the remaining core of Burton, guard Matt Allocco and forward Tae Davis — who started alongside Shrewsberry and Njie in the season opener and again Wednesday — didn’t have enough in the tank to beat North Carolina.
North Carolina (21-12) held Burton to 11 points, half of his season average, on 3-of-11 shooting from the field. Davis scored nine on 3-of-13 shooting. Allocco, who accounted for half his team’s 3-pointers Tuesday, added nine points on 3-of-6 shooting from the field.
The Irish were held to 32.3% shooting from the field (20-of-62) and 30.0% from the 3 (6-of-20) by a team that allowed 76.1 points per game in its first 32 games. That started with locking down Burton, who scored 23 points in 23 minutes off the bench in a 74-73 home loss to North Carolina in his return from injury on Jan. 4.
The Tar Heels assigned 6-foot-6 guard Drake Powell to the 6-0 Burton from the opening tip.
“I think one of the things that is most difficult against a scorer and especially Markus who leads the ACC in scoring is going up against length,” said North Carolina head coach Hubert Davis. “So, we just felt like starting the game off with Drake would make it even more difficult for him to be able to score.
“Markus is a great scorer because he can score from all three levels. He can get fouled, get to the free-throw line. He can go either direction.
“But I thought Drake's length bothered him and made him work a little bit harder than usual.”
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Burton, who was relegated to All-ACC Second Team despite leading the conference in scoring at the end of the regular season, admitted to being “super tired” immediately after scoring 10 points in Tuesday’s 55-54 win over Pittsburgh. He couldn’t find much of a rhythm Wednesday either.
“I mean, it's honestly just been a tough week for me,” Burton said. “I feel like both Pitt and North Carolina did a really good job of guarding me and keeping me out of the paint and just denying me. So, credit to them. But it is what it is. You just move on and become better.”
Notre Dame needs to hope moving on and becoming better for Burton doesn’t mean an Irish goodbye this offseason. Burton could his explore his options via the transfer portal or the NBA Draft, the latter of which he did last offseason with the intent to return to ND.
Notre Dame will look significantly different next season regardless. Allocco, center Nikita Konstantynovskyi, guard Julian Roper II and forward Burke Chebuhar exhausted their NCAA eligibility this year. Local guard J.R. Konieczny went through Senior Day ceremonies on Saturday and is on track to graduate in May, though he still has one season of eligibility left to use. Whether that will be in South Bend, Ind., remains to be seen.
The offseason starts now for ND head coach Micah Shrewsberry.
“Nothing’s ever guaranteed right now in this world when people are free to leave whenever they want to,” he said. “But for us, we have to recruit kids that want to be great basketball players. We've only got to recruit kids that that Notre Dame degree means something to them.”
“I think we have a great group of that. I'm excited about our guys. I'm excited about the young guys that we had and how they've played.
“You don't get to March and start building relationships with players. It's a year-long process. They're not just guys on our team. These guys are like literally — this is our family.
“But they have choices. But it's going to be a hard choice, because of how we treat them on a daily basis, because of the degree that we have and because of how much better they can get as basketball players.
“The ones that stay, good things are ahead for them.”
Micah Shrewsberry delivered that message after Burton, who earlier was sitting directly to his left, and Allocco were allowed to leave the press conference to head back to the locker room.
The Irish signed a nationally respected recruiting class in November — four-star forwards Jalen Haralson, Ryder Frost and Brady Koehler and three-star center Tommy Ahneman — that will join the program later this year. But the 12th-ranked class, per Rivals, needs to be supplemented by Notre Dame holding onto the available talent on its roster and adding more help via the transfer portal.
A reporter suggested to Shrewsberry that players from the ACC have been lured to the SEC with financial incentives and asked for his reaction. Shrewsberry, who earlier in the press conference mentioned the ACC’s poor performance in the ACC/SEC Challenge, was more interested in keeping the focus on the Irish.
“I'm worried about my own team,” Shrewsberry said. “I'm worried about the guys in that Notre Dame uniform. Who are we going to have help us get better? Maybe who can we add to help us get better? Our recruiting class to coming to help us get better. I can't focus on anybody else in the league, man. I've got three other kids at home I gotta to worry about, too, and what they're doing.
“If I get us right, we're going to help the league. Like, there's one more team that's helping the league that's giving you opportunities. That's what we need to do individually. As a group, we gotta raise our level, one by one. Louisville did it, and they helped raise the league, because they got better in their own way.”
A Louisville-like turnaround at Notre Dame next season would be impressive. First-year head coach Pat Kelsey turned the Cardinals (25-6) into the No. 2 seed in the ACC Tournament after inheriting a team that went 8-24 a year ago. Louisville’s roster this season includes 15 players who transferred in last offseason. That can’t be what Notre Dame’s roster looks like next season.
Though the pieces on Notre Dame’s roster next season may still be uncertain, Shrewsberry has a plan for what he’d like to improve. The job starts as soon as he arrives back in South Bend.
“I didn't feel like I did a very good job defensively with this group,” Shrewsberry said. “We were a really tough, gritty, nasty defensive team last year. We spent a lot of the offseason trying to be better offensively, and at times we lost that grittiness. We lost that toughness that we needed.
“Our numbers defensively weren't very good. Our offensive numbers were pretty good for a while until we started losing people. When all of our shooting is sitting on the sideline in sweatsuits, our offensive numbers dropped.
“But we were a top-50 to top-40 offensive team for a really long time, but we didn't have that same grittiness that we had last year defensively.
“I think we need to build that back up with who we are. We need to keep getting better. We need to stay at that pace offensively. We need to become a better passing team. We need to add more shooting. Our decision-making’s got to go up. This was probably one of the fewest assist teams I've ever been around, and a lot of that was the shot making.
“We gotta get back in the gym. We gotta work.”
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