University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Practice Pays Off In Comeback
December 1, 2003 | Lucas
Nov. 29, 2003
By Adam Lucas
CLEVELAND--One of the qualities Carolina fans have come to demand in their basketball coach is an ability to see the future.
Good news--Roy Williams does it well.
Last week at practice, Williams closed practice with a simple drill. Three minutes were put on the clock, and the Blue team, made up largely of reserves, was given a 76-70 advantage over the White squad, made up mostly of starters.
"Three minutes," Williams told his team. "Down six. Take your time and get it back."
So it must have seemed like d?j? vu Saturday evening in Cleveland when the Tar Heels looked up at the scoreboard and saw Cleveland State holding a 76-72 lead with 2:46 to play.
Under three minutes. Down four. Take your time and get it back.
After going on a 10-0 run and claiming a tougher-than-expected 82-76 road victory, it seems that although practice may not make perfect--this game isn't going in anyone's time capsule, and Williams looked exasperated even after moving his team to 3-0--practice does make victories.
"It was just like practice," Jawad Williams said. "That makes us more calm. When we got down we started rushing our shots, which is always bad, but then we realized we had to take our time and take good shots."
That realization came none too early. When Raymond Felton failed to box out and allowed an offensive rebound with three minutes left, Percell Coles turned the second chance into a three-pointer that gave the Vikings--whose cartoonish mascot looks suspiciously like something out of Super Mario Brothers--a 76-72 advantage.
To that point, the Tar Heels had gotten subpar games from Felton and Rashad McCants and Jackie Manuel had been out of action since midway through the first half with a sprained knee. At one point in the opening half the Tar Heels had almost half of the 2003 Winston-Salem Reynolds High School lineup on the floor, as a combination of Felton, Reyshawn Terry, Justin Bohlander, Williams, and Melvin Scott played most of the last four minutes. That sentence alone should be enough to indicate the possibility of an upset.
During a Roy Williams-called timeout with 2:46 to play and facing that four-point deficit, the message was simple.
"He said, 'This is the time when you guys become a good team,'" Sean May said. "He told us if we wanted to be a good team, this was the time to prove it. You're facing a little adversity and you have to stay together and figure it out."
Longtime Carolina fans know that games like this follow a predictable script. They open with the home team in awe, the home crowd expecting to be entertained by the visiting superstars. When Roy Williams emerged from the locker room about an hour before tip-off, he was immediately besieged by autograph requests.
After the opening awe, there is a lull when the crowd generally expects the Tar Heels to blow the home team away. A dangerous time period follows--if Carolina doesn't comply with a blowout, both the home crowd and home players begin to realize that the team wearing light blue isn't an NBA franchise after all.
That moment came with about five minutes left in the first half, as a 14-point UNC lead melted almost completely away when Victor Morris turned a Carolina turnover into a three-pointer that trimmed the CSU deficit to three.
The trifectas kept falling in the second half, and at one point it looked like Coles--who fired 16 times from beyond the arc and hit five--was about to take his place beside Fred Vinson, the Barry brothers, Lakista McCuller and Randolph Childress in the ranks of Carolina-killers from the perimeter.
The Heels were able to hold CSU off thanks largely to the homestanding Williams, who had 51 friends and family in attendance and was playing against his cousin, Omari Westley, who finished with a double-double of his own (20 points and 11 rebounds). Trailing by one, UNC's junior leader--who might have been slender the last time some of his family saw him but now boasts a muscular frame that enabled him to frequently score from the paint when Carolina needed a basket--tipped out a missed McCants free throw and then calmly swished a three-pointer from in front of the Tar Heel bench that proved to be the final dagger.
It was one of the final pieces of an endgame situation that saw a young Carolina team--remember, none of these Heels have ever played in an NCAA Tournament game--respond with cold-blooded calm in a situation that might have otherwise provoked a frenzy.
Practice didn't make perfect. But in this case, it made good enough.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly, click here.
