By Briana Gorman

bgorman@heraldsun.com; 419-6668

CHAPEL HILL -- North Carolina senior Marcus Ginyard said he could feel it during warm-ups before Sunday's game against Valparaiso. He could sense he and his Tar Heel teammates didn't have an urgency to play or an excitement to be out on the court.

And that lack of energy carried into the game.

The sixth-ranked Tar Heels played a sluggish first half and then allowed the Crusaders to trim a 24-point second half lead to nine in the final two minutes before hanging on for an 88-77 victory at the Smith Center.

"I said before the season started that some days we're going to be pretty good and some days we're going to be pretty ugly," UNC coach Roy Williams said. "And today was one of those days, I thought we were pretty ugly."

Williams said his team was complacent against the Crusaders, and his players didn't disagree. UNC (3-0) finished with 14 turnovers, five more than Valpo, and Ginyard lost the ball a team-high five times compared to his six assists.

Ginyard said he was mad at himself after the game but when asked to explain he shook his head.

"No, I don't want to go in to it."

The Crusaders (0-2) kept it close at the start of the game and 3-pointer by Brandon McPherson, who finished with 20, tied the score at 22 with 8:27 to go in the first half. But the Tar Heels then went on a 9-0 run, thanks to a Tyler Zeller layup and free throw, and 3-pointers by Larry Drew II and Ginyard, to take back the lead.

The Tar Heels entered the break with a 38-31 advantage, but the team's leading scorer, Deon Thompson, had just four points and one technical foul.

Thompson got tangled up with Valpo's Cameron Witt while jostling for rebounding position and hit Witt near the back of his head. Thompson said he wasn't trying to hurt Witt and it was a bad play on his part.

Thompson sat on the bench for the final four minutes of the first half, but made up for it after the break. He scored 12 points in the first six minutes of the second period to help the Tar Heels build their largest lead of the game at 67-43 with 11:55 to play.

"[The technical] definitely made me mad," Thompson said. "[I] definitely don't want to be a negative towards my team. That's not something that I was aiming to do."

But as the second half wore on, the Crusaders began to chip away at the Tar Heels' lead from the outside as a McPherson 3-pointer, his fourth of the night, cut the score to 84-75 with 1:52 to play. Valpo finished 12 of 27 from beyond the arc and Brandon Wood recorded six 3s for a game-high 30 points.

But Valpo got not closer than nine as UNC held on off in the final minutes of the game.

Drew said Williams didn't yell at the Tar Heels after the game, but instead the coach didn't have much to say, which scares the sophomore even more.

He admitted the next few practices before heading to New York for the Championship Rounds of the 2K Sports Coaches vs. Cancer Classic could be tough since the Tar Heels will face No. 16 Ohio State and either No. 13 Cal or Syracuse.

"This is a wake up call for everybody," said Drew, who had a career-high 13 points including three 3s. "We're going to go to New York and if we play like we did in the second half today we'll get ate up up there. I'm not travelling all the way to New York just to get embarrassed. I think that this team, we have a lot of potential, we need to wake up now and notice the games aren't going to get any easier, they're just going to get harder so we got to go out there and play better."