University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: MBB Asked & Answered
February 18, 2003 | Men's Basketball
Feb. 18, 2003
By Adam Lucas
efore we start this week's installment, a quick public service announcement. Carolina's sixth-ranked women's basketball team makes the short trip to Durham for what should be a terrific game Thursday night at 7. Tickets are still available by calling 919-681-BLUE or 1-877-375-DUKE or by clicking here, and if it's anything like the first matchup of the year, it will be a game you want to experience in person, not on television. Sylvia Hatchell and her Tar Heels would undoubtedly like to see as much light blue as they can in Cameron Indoor.
In your article about the Wake Forest game, you mentioned that David Noel graded out tops on the team for his defensive effort against N.C. State. How are the players graded on their performance?
Jeremy Flythe, Arlington, VA
We put your question to Matt Doherty last Friday, and he answered it this way: "The coaches watch tape for two to two-and-a-half hours and go over each possession, both offensively and defensively. We grade things like defense, assists and turnovers, good plays to bad plays, offensive rebounds, screens, charges drawn, and all those kinds of things. We break it down pretty detailed and make clips out of the tapes and show the team the clips.
"Raymond Felton graded out highest against Virginia, but we had a lot of very good grades. Byron [Sanders] was second, Jackie was close, Jawad had a great grade, Rashad had a great grade, Melvin had a great grade, everyone who played had a great grade. Every guy who played, their grade was so high that they would've won the defensive award in other games that we've played."
It's a safe bet that the grades weren't as high in the Clemson game, when the help defense and other details weren't as crisp as they were against the Cavaliers.
Am I the only Carolina Blue colored blood spilling Tar Heel Fan in the southeast U.S. that thinks that the Heels would have had a better chance to set up a play had they gotten across the half court line, called timeout and set something up? What urgency was there? Secondly, why, oh why did the boys wait until there were only 7 seconds left on the scoreboard to foul?
George Kelley, Jr., Leland, NC
The answer to the first part of the question isn't clear-cut. Many fans think the Heels should have called timeout in the endgame situation against the Tigers, but many of those same fans have pointed out that Carolina hasn't been very efficient in their halfcourt offense this year. The principle behind not calling timeout, one that Doherty undoubtedly learned from Dean Smith, is that you don't allow the other team to set their defense, instead trying to take advantage of a breakdown. In this case, it actually happened--if you go back and watch the tape, you'll see that Rashad McCants was standing wide-open on the left wing when Raymond Felton took his last three-pointer. McCants only got that open because of the frenzy associated with a dash down the court. He wouldn't have found such an opening if a timeout had been called. Of course, he also didn't get to shoot that shot, but it's hard to fault Felton for taking the shot that he did. Every coach wants players who want to take the big shot. Felton is going to take many more of them during his Carolina career, and the guess here is that when he makes his first Tar Heel game-winner, he'll look back and reflect that the end-of-game experience at Littlejohn made him a better player. Doherty, likewise, may decide to handle the situation differently next time--although he may not. Only one thing definitely won't change: whether or not the shot goes in at the end will determine how the strategy is perceived, timeout or not.
As for the second part of the question, Carolina definitely didn't want to let 20 seconds tick away before getting a clock-stopping foul. "We were trying to foul," Doherty said after the game. "I thought we got the foul earlier."
The players involved felt the same way. "I thought we were fouling him," Noel said. "I felt the foul." That's the way it goes sometimes in the game of basketball. When you want to foul, it's not called, and when you don't want to foul, it is called.
I wish we turned the ball over more. That's right. In the rough patch we've hit this season, one seeming bright spot in the box score is the low number of turnovers we committed. But I am not misled by this stat because, watching the games, I can see the correlation between low turnovers and low field goal percentage. Is a missed shot automatically better than a turnover or is it the sign of an ambitious shot chosen over an ambitious play? In the first 27 years of my life, the best Carolina teams usually committed 16-20 turnovers per game because that was the risk the run and jump offense ran in its methodical, and successful, quest for the high percentage shot. Now it seems like defenses rattle the team into rushing shots which might appear in the heat of battle to be a better way to score points than making a bad pass and giving up an easy bucket. But, now that we have such strong passers and ballhandlers, couldn't the trade-off of more turnovers leading to fewer bricks ultimately prove more advantageous?
Brian Shuman, New York City
Interesting premise, although it's an arguable point. A missed shot is better than a turnover if only because it presents the opportunity for an offensive rebound. Plus, you're assuming that all bad passes that lead to turnovers would have led to a good shot. That's not the case, as by their very nature, passes leading to turnovers were contested in some fashion, which isn't the mark of an easy shot.
Let's look at the stats. Here are Carolina's turnovers per game and overall field goal percentage for the past five seasons:
So more turnovers don't automatically lead to a higher percentage from the field. That's especially true for this team, which has shot fifty percent from the field in only two games--Penn State and Virginia. Those two games saw 14 and 13 Tar Heel turnovers, respectively, among the lowest of the year.
Although this team is only 13-11 right now, with all of their potential and depth, do you feel that these freshmen will go down as the most talented recruiting class in UNC history?
Andy Young, Dayton, OH
Tough question, as there are a lot of talented recruiting classes from which to choose. Carolina hauled in quite a class in 1990, bringing in Eric Montross, Cliff Rozier, Brian Reese, and Derrick Phelps (all four of whom were McDonald's All-Americans, although it's been proven that that's no guarantee of success) along with Pat Sullivan. That's quite a class, and that group--minus Rozier, who left for Louisville after his freshman year--won a national title. Other classes that would give this group some competition include the triple threat of Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, and Jeff McInnis that entered in 1993 and the Antawn Jamison/Vince Carter/Ademola Okulaja trio entering in 1995. For historical reference, the class that entered in 1973 featured Walter Davis, John Kuester, and Tommy LaGarde, all of whom played professional basketball, and the classes entering in 1982 (Brad Daugherty, Steve Hale, and Warren Martin) and 1983 (Dave Popson, Kenny Smith, and Joe Wolf) weren't bad either.
This class definitely has the raw talent to compete with those groups. But it's also worth remembering that you're comparing apples and oranges. Even ten years ago, it was still exceptionally unusual for freshmen to have a pronounced impact on their team. That's why Michigan's Fab Five was so intriguing in 1992 and 1993, because most fans had never seen such dramatic impact from freshmen. Even in today's early-entry and NBA-happy world, there still hasn't been another Fab Five.
If the Heels happen to not do very well in the second half of the ACC season and a trip to the NCCA tournament is not in the picture, do you think the Heels should look into red-shirting Sean May and not bringing him back for the end of the season? Can this even happen or has he played too many games already this season? We could potentially salvage a lost season for Sean May and offer him another year of eligibility where he could be at full strength.
Greg Rhoads, Naperville, Illinois
To head off the inevitable flood of Sean May questions for this week, click here for Friday's doctor report. May will return to the doctor this Friday, but no matter what feedback he gets, he won't be eligible for a redshirt. There are two types of redshirts: voluntary and medical. For a voluntary redshirt, the player must decide before the season begins and sit out every game to qualify. Clearly, May doesn't fit that criteria. The other type is a medical redshirt, which is commonly granted when a player suffers a season-ending injury very early in the season. However, for one of those to be granted, the player in question must have played in fewer than 20 percent of his team's games. May doesn't fit that criteria either.
Adam Lucas will answer your questions about the Carolina men's basketball program this season in an exclusive column published each Tuesday. Lucas, editor of the Tar Heel Monthly, will answer your questions on personnel, strategy, opponents and anything on your mind about the Tar Heels OTHER THAN RECRUITING SPECIFICS. Please send your questions to Adam at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com, and include your first and last names and your hometown.
