Lucas: Winners

By Adam Lucas

This is the time of year when Roy Williams loves to go recruiting. He has seen a little bit of everything in the month of December. He has seen scorers and rebounders and passers and still he goes out again, virtually every night he possibly can, even while the Carolina season is ongoing, because he is still looking for that one thing he needs to see with his own eyes.

Film can show you the rotation on a player's shot and the way they make contact on a box out. But it can't show you everything, which is why—when so many of his coaching brethren are enjoying a night off or sending out an assistant—Williams spends his Decembers racking up air and road miles to see games in person, with his own eyes, so he can find that elusive quality that separates excellent, high-quality basketball players from Tar Heels: he wants to see the winners.

Any time he makes the effort to go watch a prospect in person, he already knows he's going to watch the best player in the gym. That's the only way to get on the Carolina recruiting list. He wants to see the intangibles and the effort. He wants to see the high school players who have the initiative he knows he can pair with his teaching ability to produce winning college basketball players.

There are times he has to reconcile the fact that the winners are not always the actual winners. Williams was slightly troubled by the fact that Marvin Williams' high school teams were never very good. But when he watched the Bremerton, Wash. native play, he noticed that when he wasn't in the game, Marvin Williams was fetching water for his (much less talented) teammates. This, Roy Williams knew, was a player who would fit. And that's how, as a freshman at Carolina, Marvin Williams—on his way to becoming a lottery pick—came off the bench the entire year and was completely happy as his team won the national title.

So this is how Roy Williams builds his team. And that's how he ends up with players like Theo Pinson and Joel Berry and Kenny Williams, all of whom were essential in Saturday's 73-69 Atlantic Coast Conference-opening win over Wake Forest.

You saw it, so you know: this was not a thing of beauty. Carolina had a nine-point lead late in the second half and managed to fritter it completely away through a combination of careless execution and lack of defensive intensity.

But it was also a win. And the Tar Heels won not by superior talent or better athleticism, but by, quite simply, winning plays.

This was supposed to be the year for opponents to take advantage of Carolina's dependence on offensive rebounding. Without Kennedy Meeks, without Isaiah Hicks, this was the year Roy Williams' strategy of banging for every offensive rebound was going to fail.

So what happens in the first ACC game of 2017-18? The Tar Heels held a 14-4 edge on the offensive glass, which turned into a whopping 16-0 edge in second chance points.

Wake Forest probably out-executed Carolina in halfcourt offense. But of Carolina's 39 missed shots, they recovered 14 of them.

"You don't have a choice," said Theo Pinson, who had two offensive boards, including one that turned into a slick assist to Luke Maye for a key basket. "You rebound or you won't play. The last three practices he's preached that. It came in handy tonight. You're not going to make every shot, so why not go to the boards and try to get another shot?"

Why not? Because it's a lot of work, that's why. Also, it requires a little extra hustle, because going to the rim offensively means you've got more ground to cover sprinting back on defense.

Those are the plays young players don't always want to make, because they haven't always had to do it. Williams finds the ones who are willing to learn, and he makes them into the 2018 version of Theo Pinson.

Then there's Kenny Williams, who could be off sulking in the corner while he worries that Cameron Johnson is going to take his minutes. Instead, Williams has made himself into the team's best perimeter defender and an indispensable part of the rotation. And at the end of Saturday's game, when Roy Williams wanted his five best players on the court, Kenny Williams was one of them.

He was in the game as part of the smaller lineup that features Luke Maye at center. That lineup is fun to watch offensively but is always one bad switch away from disaster defensively. And that's how Williams came to be guarding Wake Forest's seven-foot Doral Moore in the post in a tie game with less than a minute to play.

Here's the technical explanation of how he gave up an eight-inch height advantage and still limited Moore to zero points on the two biggest possessions of the game: he fought. That's it.

It sounds very simple, but this is a promise: there are five-star, YouTube superstar players who would have just given up. Williams isn't one of them.

"I was trying to do whatever I could," the junior said. "I wanted to front him, because I knew somebody would be behind me if they threw that lob. All I wanted to do was fight him, and make it tough for him to get the ball."

And give the head coach a little credit, too. "Coach could have said only the little guys switch, and Luke stay on Moore," Kenny Williams said. "But he knows all of us will fight in that situation to stay in front of the big guy, and once we get in front, it's all about the communication and the help."

Of course he knows they'll fight. That's why they're on the team.

All that was left, at that point, was for Pinson to once again make clutch free throws and Joel Berry to make the closest thing to a Cota Floata since the actual Ed Cota was on the roster.

Pinson drained a pair to tie the game with 51 seconds left. When asked yet again about his clutch free throw proficiency, one of his first thoughts was not about his bevy of makes as a Tar Heel, but of a couple of misses.

"My freshman year, we played in the Bahamas, and I missed the free throws. Little things like that, I still remember them," he said.

It reminds you a little of that Michael Jordan quote about his missed game-winners. "I've failed over and over and over again in my life," Jordan said. "And that is why I succeed."

And so, Pinson continues to succeed at the line, where no one except for him recalls those missed free throws in a meaningless exhibition game in the Bahamas.

His roommate, Berry, has also turned a negative into a positive. While the rest of the world was snickering about his video game injury, remember what Berry did while he was sitting out with his broken right hand? He worked on his left hand, because he felt he wasn't as effective going to his left.

That's how, in a tie game with 15 seconds to play, he was able to take two hard dribbles with his left hand, then arch in an impossible teardrop over Moore with his right to put the Tar Heels ahead.

Roy Williams never saw Berry make that shot on his recruiting visits to Apopka, Florida. But he saw the potential, and the willingness to compete.

"That's what Joel does," Kenny Williams said simply. "He just makes plays. We're used to it."

It's OK to get used to those types of winning plays. Just don't take them for granted. And remember that they're not so easy to find.

Players Mentioned

Cameron Johnson

Luke Maye

Theo Pinson

Kenny Williams

Related Videos