University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Long Night, Faces In Chapel Hill
February 1, 2002 | Men's Basketball
Feb. 1, 2002
By Adam Lucas
TarheelBlue.com
Wearing a shirt that read, "Carolina Pride," Kris Lang's expression said it all in the Carolina locker room Thursday night. As the clock ticked past 11:30 and reporters continued to fire questions at him, his face showed the shock of the loss.
Reporters love to quote statistics at players. And with each stat, the Tar Heel senior took on a more pained expression.
"Kris, they had 9 offensive rebounds in the second half..."
A furrowed brow.
"Kris, you guys had 25 turnovers tonight..."
A grimace.
"Kris, as a team you only took 44 shots tonight..."
First a raised eyebrow of disbelief, and then an outright look of pain.
That's how it went for Lang's Heels against Duke, as things went from bad to worse in a numbing second half. There have been plenty of classic Carolina-Duke games, but this wasn't one of them. The only thing classic about it was the Blue Devil defense, which was stifling. It even impressed one of their harshest critics.
"In the second half our defense was great," Mike Krzyzewski said. "It wasn't good. It was great."
Carolina helped it look even better with some painful passing. Every pass around the perimeter was an adventure, as Duke's overplaying pressure didn't allow any easy passes. It takes a certain crispness to play with the Devils, and on this night the Heels just weren't crisp.
The game--and perhaps the entire year--was summed up in the first half, when Jackie Manuel drove the baseline but suddenly got skittish on a layup, watching it roll off the rim. As the ball went the other way, Duke transfer Dahntay Jones took it down the lane and slammed it home.
Carolina fans will undoubtedly want to know why their Heels couldn't pull the same kind of shocker that Duke almost did during their down season of 1995. The answer is simple--if it happened all the time, we wouldn't still be talking about it.
Those aforementioned 44 shot attempts were a season low. The 25 turnovers tied the previous "low" mark set against Maryland. Carolina fans will still be talking about this game in half a decade, but it will be more in tones of, "Think how far we've come since that 2002 game."
The Tar Heels weren't the only proud program taking a whipping on Thursday night. Oregon laid a 30-point whipping on UCLA, illustrating this simple fact of college basketball life: teams lose. Neither the Bruins nor the Tar Heels have a birthright to winning seasons. And if the bad ones come along only once every 40 years, maybe that's not too distressing.
Most surprisingly, there was a sense from the crowd that they understood the situation. There was a time this year, like the narrow win over Binghamton or the loss to Indiana, when the Smith Center fans seemed to be demanding that Will Johnson morph into Vince Carter and Adam Boone transform into Phil Ford. That time is gone.
Where a 30-point loss would have once been cause for the entire arena to empty at the 8:00 timeout, Thursday night something amazing happened. With under 2:30 left, a rousing, "Tar...Heels" chant began in the student section and spread throughout the arena.
The team took notice. Doherty pointed out the never-say-die fans to his seniors sitting on the bench. Lang cited them after the game. And even Krzyzewski said, "The crowd was great."
The crowd was great, but the team wasn't. And Kris Lang's face told the entire story.
Adam Lucas is the co-publisher of Basketball America. He is a lifelong observer of UNC sports and can be reached at JAdamLucas@aol.com.
