University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Felton Kick-Starts McCants, Heels
February 12, 2003 | Men's Basketball
Feb. 12, 2003
By Adam Lucas
The stat sheet will show that the play that started Wednesday night's game for Carolina was a Jawad Williams three-pointer just 35 seconds into the ACC contest against Virgiinia.
The stats will be wrong.
What started this game, what began a tidal wave of scoring and emotion that saw the Tar Heels blitz out to a 17-point first-half lead, actually came two minutes later. Already holding an 8-0 lead, Raymond Felton yo-yoed the ball on a 3-on-1 fast break. He could have done most anything with the basketball, but he did the thing that would most help his team, both at the moment and for the remainder of the game: he left a behind-the-back pass for Rashad McCants, allowing his fellow freshman, who had missed his first shot, to get an easy basket and get on track offensively.
"He was open," Felton said. "We've got to get him clicking. We've got to get his confidence going, and that was a way to get it going."
"I just played," McCants said. "I didn't think about my shot going down. I just focused on the game."
You can marvel at most any point of Felton's stellar floor game Wednesday night. He dropped in 21 points and handed out five assists, directing the Tar Heels to their first 50-percent field goal shooting effort since the season-opening win over Penn State. But no play he made was bigger than that early fast break when he consciously got McCants into the offensive flow, successfully getting his fellow rookie thinking about nothing more than just playing the game.
Carolina can win without McCants. They proved it Saturday, beating Florida State by one lonely point. But they can't win pretty without McCants.
Once he kicked it into gear against the Wahoos, he helped out with some early defensive pressure that had Virginia throwing the ball all over the Smith Center. Virginia had 11 turnovers in the first half, a figure almost equal to their errors for the entire game in the first meeting of the year between these two teams, a game that saw Carolina go with a passive zone in the first half that seemed to stagnate the Heels both on offense and defense.
"If we pressured the ball then they would get tired, and we could take advantage of our offense with that smaller lineup and drive on them," said sophomore Jawad Williams, who chipped in 12 points.
That's exactly what happened, as Carolina played very efficiently on offense, notching 12 assists on 14 first-half field goals, some of the best ball movement all season.
"We played hard," Felton said. "We executed our offense and moved the ball. We cut hard on screens and got good shots."
Meanwhile, Virginia couldn't seem to find any good shots. The Cavaliers shot below 40 percent for the game as Carolina's smaller lineup--David Noel started in place of Byron Sanders and did a credible job on beefy Travis Watson--forced Virginia coach Pete Gillen to keep starting forward Elton Brown on the bench for all but eight minutes, just one of them in the second half. Brown had been a major load for the Heels in Charlottesville, scoring 10 points and grabbing six rebounds.
In the rematch, however, Matt Doherty dictated Virginia's style of play with the smaller lineup. To gauge how far this team has come, remember that this same smaller lineup occasionally looked overwhelmed just three weeks ago at NC State.
They weren't overmatched Wednesday, as Felton finished the game with a flurry of points, passes, and poise that eventually established the final 81-67 margin.
He deserved to finish the game. After all, he started it--no matter what the stats say.
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.
