Lucas: The Rim Protector

By Adam Lucas

LOUISVILLE—Think of all the plays Joel Berry has made. All the baskets. All the big three-pointers. All the drives to the basket and finishes through an impossible amount of contact.

And yet, it took until he had three regular season games left in his Tar Heel career before he made the quintessential Joel Berry play, the one we'll see ten years from now and immediately say—yep, that was Joel Berry. It was the tough little nut in a, well, in a tough little nutshell.

If I only had five seconds of film to describe to you what kind of player Berry has been for Carolina, I would play you the sequence with under three minutes to go in Louisville on Saturday night. The Tar Heels had an 83-75 lead in a game they needed to win. The Cardinals were hanging around but could never get their deficit under seven points.

Berry missed a jumper, the Cardinals got the rebound and…oh no. Six-foot-10 Ray Spalding was ahead of the UNC defense, was going to slam the ball through and cut the Carolina lead to six for the first time since it was 12-6. The Yum! Center crowd could feel the run coming, and the Tar Heels have suffered a collapse here before, and…

No.

Spalding did indeed catch the ball ahead of the Carolina defense. And he did indeed go up for a dunk. But somehow, for some reason, there was Berry. That's Berry, listed as six-foot-0 in your program but John Henson-esque in his heart.

He had no business challenging the shot. Plays like this against near seven-footers are when six-footers get put on posters. And this wasn't a swipe at the ball while Spalding was still on the floor. This was a full-on, elevate with the big man and try to reject it shot block attempt, against a player a full ten inches taller than him. No one thought this was a good idea.

Except Joel Berry. Which is all that mattered. What made the play so perfectly Joel Berry was that it didn't appear he ever considered any other outcome. Of course he would block the bigger man's shot. Whatever else you thought might have happened on that play, those other options never even entered his mind, and that's why he is Joel Berry.

"That was all out of instinct," Berry said. "Plus, I probably would've gotten yelled at by Coach, because I was supposed to be back for defensive balance."

We'll let it slide this time, Joel. How good a play was it? Even one of the game officials subtly came up to Berry during a subsequent stoppage of play.

"That," the official said, "was a heck of a block."

"That's how you win championships," Berry said. "Those are plays that winning teams need. The block shows up in the stats but the hustle doesn't show up in the stats. I was just trying to make a play."

Like all good shot blockers, of course, Berry kept the ball in bounds. Luke Maye managed to control his surprise long enough to recover the ball, then gave it back to Berry, and the Tar Heels closed the game on a 13-3 run. The block seemed to demoralize Louisville, which tends to happen when the smallest player on the court rejects a dunk.

Maybe you had to be in the building, but it felt very much like the Cardinals were about to make a push if Spalding converted the dunk. Ten years from now, it will seem odd to remember that a blocked shot made such a substantial difference in a 17-point victory. But it did.

And while Berry's play will get most of the attention, Carolina made multiple similar plays during the game. With eight minutes left, Kenny Williams—who quietly had one of his most Kenny Williams-ish games of the year, which is to say that he made every winning play the Tar Heels needed to make—sprinted back to thwart a potential Louisville two-on-one fast break. At the time, the Cardinals looked to have an easy basket that would've taken the Tar Heel lead under ten. Instead, purely because of Williams' hustle (which, as Berry noted, you won't find anywhere in the stat sheet), they didn't score.

Coaches can laud it. Fans can applaud it. But plays like that don't truly become part of a team's identity until the players themselves fully commit to and recognize their value. So it's not surprising that when Carolina came out of the huddle after the next media timeout, Theo Pinson pulled Williams aside.

"That was a huge play," Pinson told the junior.

That's all it takes. Pinson was in the middle of another terrific do-everything game, scoring 19 points to go with seven rebounds and five assists. But his longest-lasting impact might be that he took a couple seconds to commend Williams. That's a senior who is one of only a dozen players in the program's history to play in two national title games understanding the nuances that make all those victories possible.

"There have been plays like that this year that we didn't get," Pinson said. "They are all about confidence. The confidence to keep playing, so that if that situation comes up again, it's second nature."

"It says a lot about how much we want to win," Williams said. "Early in ACC play you probably wouldn't have seen someone make that play. I can't give you an explanation for why, but the effort wasn't there. Now, we understand we're getting down to the grind, and we have to make all of those plays."

Williams' play won't land on anyone's highlight tape. But his teammates know that Berry's play is one they'll see for years to come. And if they don't see it, they'll most definitely hear about it.

As Berry got off the bus at the Louisville airport late on Saturday night, he was still getting comments on his big block. He nodded to acknowledge them.

"From now on," he said as he walked up the aisle of the bus, "just call me The Rim Protector."

Players Mentioned

Luke Maye

Theo Pinson

Kenny Williams

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