‘We have everything we need’: UNC women’s basketball moves on, develops new-look offense

Former North Carolina women’s basketball guard Deja Kelly posted a four-minute long TikTok video Monday in which she explained her decision to transfer.

“I ultimately just carried that program on my back for four years,” she said. “In the most humble way.”

Kelly listed many of her accolades in the video, including All-ACC first team for three years. She cited herself as a big reason the program returned to the national stage. Kelly said she outgrew her environment in Chapel Hill, which led to her decision to transfer to Oregon this past offseason.

At the 2024 ACC Tipoff in Charlotte on Wednesday, UNC coach Courtney Banghart addressed the video and spoke about the outlook of the Tar Heels’ offense without Kelly.

“Deja and I have had a great journey together and we’ve stayed very close,” Banghart said. “I think for someone who has her life on social media — she’s a young person and that gets tiring at times. You put a microphone on someone who’s highly emotional at a hard time when people are coming at her… you have an emotional reaction to that.”

“She’s a four-year senior who left a great legacy at Carolina, who did a lot for us,” Banghart added. “It’s how it’s supposed to be now. Our team needed to be like this and have a little more movement and all the things and she needed a new opportunity to kind of get out of her comfort zone and be pushed to do different things.”

‘The ball is moving better’

Even without Kelly, the team’s leading scorer the past three seasons, the Tar Heels appear confident in their offense. Banghart said, with this group, it’s much easier to score.

“We’ve had a tough time scoring the past few years, and the ball got stuck at times,” she said. “We’re now playing off of closeouts better, and we’re playing off of space because the ball is moving better.”

Since the 2021-2022 season, UNC’s scoring has steadily declined. Then, the Tar Heels’ offense ranked third in the ACC with 73.1 points per game. They dropped to eighth in 2022-2023, and then 11th this past season.

Ball movement, as Banghart indicated, played a large factor in the team’s scoring issues. With a guard room depleted by injury — Kayla McPherson and Paulina Paris were both sidelined from January until the end of the season, then-freshman Laila Hull redshirted and Reniya Kelly missed several games due to two separate injuries — Deja Kelly stepped up at several points as the team’s primary ballhandler.

North Carolina averaged 12.55 assists — the worst mark in the conference — last year. Across Division I basketball, the Tar Heels ranked 119th out of 349 teams in assists per game.

“That’s not what she’s great at — ball distribution,” Banghart said of Kelly, later adding, “I just knew with how we were going to play, there were going to have to be some changes to our system that she might not thrive in as well. She might not get as many shots and she might not get the ball in her hands as much.”

‘There were certain deficiencies’

This offseason, Banghart and her coaching staff focused on “certain deficiencies” in each player’s game.

“Lexi [Donarski] had to be better with her left hand off the dribble,” Banghart said. “That’s all we worked on. I didn’t let her shoot one shot for two months. It was all left-hand dribble. Maria [Gakdeng] had to finish through contact and over-the-top… and had to get stronger. Alyssa had to really expand her game and be a legitimate 3-point threat at over 30%.”

The staff dedicated two months this summer to honing these individual areas.

For Alyssa Ustby, that looked like breaking the fifth-year’s shot down to the basics. She started with the ball on her knee and drilled rudimentary shooting progression exercises. Banghart said the routine will pay dividends for Ustby this season and well into her future pro career.

“I told her, ‘I’ll give you everything I’ve got to get you into that first round, but you’ve got to be able to make threes,’” Banghart said.

Donarski, a known 3-point threat, focused on dribbling and finishing with her left hand.

The graduate student worked on her ball control through a variety of drills with new assistant coach Cory McNeill — all in an effort to expand her game.

The Iowa State transfer was a common target last season for catch-and-shoot plays beyond the arc. But this season, she’ll need to be ready to shoot off the dribble and attack the rim more.

“It’s been really good for us over the summer just to see everybody work individually and then bring it together,” Gakdeng said. “So I think our offense is going to go really well together.”

‘We like to play in space’

Banghart said walking into practices with this year’s squad is “like Christmas morning.”

With so many new faces — three freshmen, two transfers and four players coming off of injuries — Banghart is watching matchups she’s never seen before. Ciera Toomey v. Ustby. Indya Nivar v. Jordan Zubich.

Last December, the team couldn’t play 6-on-6. The Tar Heels are now, at least for the time being, fully healthy and putting their depth to use to create space.

“We have a lot more 3-point threats this year, and that’s super exciting because that spaces out the floor,” Ustby said. “In our team, we like to play in space, and I think that’s something last year that we struggled with. Anytime Maria [Gakdeng] or I were in the paint, we were getting double-teamed, and it’s really hard to be efficient if 3-point scoring is not our strong suit. So that’s the biggest thing we worked on as a team this summer.”

Gakdeng said the team has also worked on its transition game, making the right reads against set defenses with pick-and-roll and pick-and-pop options. The forward praised the team’s versatility, something she hopes will open up things for her down low.

UNC’s offense will no doubt look different without Deja Kelly. But even without the star guard, the Tar Heels feel complete as they enter the season.

“We’ve been able to space out more,” Gakdeng said. “We have more shooters, we have an inside presence — I feel like we have everything we need.”