After UNC loss, U of L just waits

GREENSBORO, N.C. – Louisville has played 32 games. It has won 24 of them. It has struggled in many of them and thrived in -- or at least played to coach Rick Pitino's liking -- in only a few of them. And on Thursday, Louisville struggled again, this time in a 70-60 loss to North Carolina here at the ACC tournament.

Far more often than not this season, Louisville has figured out a way to get past those struggles, to overcome its shortcomings and still win. But Thursday's frustrating defeat, what with Louisville's 22-percent second-half shooting or North Carolina's timely offensive rebounds, showed what can happen when the difficulties are too much to stave off.

Now Louisville has to wait. No, it's not the same kind of wait that costs coaches and players sleep -- it's not the will-we-get-into-the-NCAA-tournament wait. It's just a where-are-we-seeded wait. But sometimes those waits can be just as intriguing, especially when it comes to teams like Louisville, teams with a lot of good in their NCAA tournament profiles but only a few specks of great.

Related:UNC outlasts U of L in ACC tourney

Louisville coach Rick Pitino didn't want this kind of weekend. He had said time and again in late February and early March that his team could rise up the selection committee's list and earn as high as a No. 2 in the NCAA tournament -- provided the Cards kept winning. He wanted to win the ACC tournament.

Instead ...

"(UNC deserved) the victory," Pitino said Thursday. "So give them a lot of credit and we'll just sit back and see who we play on Sunday."

Who Louisville (24-8) plays in next week's NCAA tournament will go a long way toward how Pitino (and the Cards' fan base) feels about his team's chances. He has maintained that, for Louisville, a good team with some noticeable flaws, matchups will be the primary factor in how far the Cards go.

Of course, the same can be said about most teams that aren't Kentucky, Virginia, Duke, Wisconsin or any of the other top seven or eight teams. But it feels particularly true with these Cardinals.

Transcript:Pitino reviews UNC loss

They learned this season that they match up well with, say, Indiana or Pittsburgh, teams with smaller lineups that will run with them. They do not match up well against teams with long, rangy front lines -- or Notre Dame.

In the locker room at the Greensboro Coliseum, Harrell said no matter who Louisville plays, there has to be some consistency. They need deflections and turnovers. They need paint touches. They need to work through offensive sets.

"We just have to get back to what we do best," Harrell said.

They earned a few days off this week by beating Virginia on Saturday and securing a No. 4 seed in the ACC tournament. They won't feel the same way about this next break, but that's what they have now: A week to prepare for their last chance to get things completely together.

"Honestly we were playing very good basketball in the last two weeks," Pitino said. "We played great against Virginia. We had a great first half against Carolina, then, when they went zone, we rushed a little bit. We missed open looks."

It's nothing new to this team or to Pitino. They found ways to get by those issues over the course of the season. But now the margin for error is all but gone, and Louisville probably lost out on a chance to play its first few NCAA tournament games close to home.

Now they just have to wait to see where they're headed -- and who they're playing.

Reach U of L beat writer Jeff Greer at (502) 582-4044 and follow him on Twitter (@jeffgreer_cj).