University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Trash the Stats
December 4, 2004 | Men's Basketball
Dec. 4, 2004
By Adam Lucas
If you don't mind, I'm going to take this postgame stat sheet from Saturday's Carolina-Kentucky game, rip it in half, ball up the pieces, and deposit it--Sean May two-hand slam dunk style--in the nearest trash receptacle.
Here's my reasoning: according to this stat sheet, Raymond Felton essentially played an average game against the Wildcats. Seven assists, five turnovers, 0-for-5 from the field, 3-for-9 from the foul line. Look at it that way, maybe even a little below average.
So obviously this stat sheet is trash.
Here's the deal: Raymond Felton has taken extra treatment on his left wrist virtually every day this week. On normal days, he wears a hard cast on it, the kind you used to try and get all the cool kids to sign in elementary school. On game days, he has to arrive early so trainer Marc Davis can wrap it in a bevy of bandages, immobilizing the sprain just enough so that it doesn't sear with every movement. And Raymond, what exactly does it feel like to play with that injury?
A pause.
"Pain," he says. "Real pain."
Then he simply proceeds to go out and dominate the opening minutes of the game, zipping downcourt like a short-circuiting Energizer bunny, dropping a pass here, firing a laser there, his head always up, eyes forward, pushing pushing pushing.
That's how Carolina races out to a 24-6 lead in the first eight minutes against a top-ten team like the Wildcats, how they wash over Kentucky in waves. You know what the highlight of that start was? Not any of the dunks, not the crisp bounce passes. It was when Marvin Williams had just, as he so often does, kept the ball alive and slammed home a one-hand shiver dunk for a 20-6 lead.
By the time the ball was through the net, Felton already had his hand up calling the defense. Roy Williams looked toward midcourt, started to raise a hand to signal the defense, and then stopped. Felton was already making the exact same call. Without prompting from the head coach.
Roy Williams allowed himself the briefest of smiles.
This stat sheet is bunk. I know this because I sat in the Smith Center and watched Felton bring the ball up the court. When he's dribbling the ball and has Jawad Williams on one side and Jackie Manuel on the other, with Sean May trailing (or occasionally leading, as he did on Saturday, when Manuel said, "I looked up and Sean was beating me down the floor") and Rashad McCants spotting up on the wing, you feel this magnetic force coming from the Smith Center rafters. One minute you're sitting comfortably in your seat, and the next--even before anything happens--you're slowly rising, craning your neck to see what Felton is going to do next. It's such a blur, you don't want to risk missing something. Even his teammates appreciate the drama of the moment.
"It's an adventure," said David Noel, the recipient of several of those laser-guided passes. "You don't know if he's going to throw you the ball or make a spectacular pass or what. You just have to be ready to catch it because it might come at you a hundred miles an hour. He'll just sling it over there. It's fun, because you never know what's going to happen."
Fun is exactly what it is, and that's something that's occasionally been missing from Carolina basketball over the past few years. What's going to happen next? How is the ball going to get from Point A to Point B? Is the lob there?
I do not see a statistic for that type of feeling on this particular stat sheet. And therefore it does not do Raymond Felton justice.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. His book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about the book, click here.
