In 2022, the North Carolina basketball team held a double digit lead against Kansas in the national title game, but they squandered said lead and lost the game. The next year in 2o23, UConn basketball made a surprise run and won the whole thing. Both of those teams want to get back to that game this season, and both of those teams met on Tuesday night in a chippy battle. The ninth ranked Tar Heels and the fifth ranked Huskies battled it out at Madison Square Garden in New York, and the top-10 clash did not disappoint.

This game was close for awhile, but UConn basketball ended up outlasting North Carolina basketball for an 87-76 win. It was a five-point game around the halfway point 0f the second half, but the Huskies took over after that to earn the impressive victory. It was a chippy game, especially between Tar Heels star Armando Bacot and Huskies star Cam Spencer.

“Yeah, he was saying things he wouldn’t say to me if we were in the park or something,” Armando Bacot said after the game in regards to Cam Spencer, according to a tweet from Adam Smith. “But it’s all good. He had a great game, so credit to him.”

Spencer also talked to the media after the game, and he noted that he wanted to play with a different level of intensity after the Kansas loss. He knew that UConn needed to bounce back with a win against North Carolina, so he played angry.

“I put a lot of that (Kansas loss) on myself,” Spencer said after the game, via David Borges. “I definitely came in with a lot of motivation and anger to help the team the best way I could. I thought we raised our intensity level from that Kansas game.”

That intensity level is likely the reason for some of the things that were said to Bacot. It seems like it did help UConn, however, as they did come out on top against North Carolina.

With the win, UConn improves to 8-1 on the season with their lone loss coming at Kansas. North Carolina is now 7-2 as they also lost earlier this season against Villanova in overtime.