University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: A Calm Comeback
March 11, 2005 | Men's Basketball
March 11, 2005
By Adam Lucas
WASHINGTON, D.C.--Come on, Roy, you can tell us.
There's eight minutes left in the ACC Tournament quarterfinal against Clemson, you're down by 13 points, and you yanked four of your players. Teaching `em a lesson, huh? Letting `em have it over there on the bench. Go get `em, Roy!
Not quite.
"I was searching," Carolina's head coach said. "What we were doing wasn't working. So I wanted them to know there was so much time left."
What? No fire and brimstone? No clipboard smashing?
Surely Sean May, one of the removed players, would tell us the truth. Really, Sean, how brutal was it over there on the Tar Heel bench?
"No, it wasn't like that," May said. "He said we should just get our rest and keep chipping away. You have to do it one possession at a time. You're not going to get it all at once."
That's the luxury of having an experienced team. Two things have become obvious over the past month: Roy Williams trusts his team. And his team trusts Roy Williams. And no matter how nerve-wracking it was about 1:30 Friday afternoon, it has a way of working out.
Maybe the best measure of how disappointing the first 30 minutes of the game were was that Williams actually had to call a timeout at the 13:25 mark, one of the first times this season he's had to stop the action and settle his team.
It was not an artistic effort. The Tar Heels' first half defensive effort was atrocious, with consistent Tiger dribble penetration leading to a 61.5% shooting effort from the field in the first 20 minutes.
"They were passing it wherever they wanted to," Jackie Manuel said. "They were driving us whenever they wanted to."
The culprit was poor help side defense and rotation, something that could be chalked up to being mentally out of the game. The recipe was set up Thursday afternoon at the MCI Center and you could almost feel it pulsing through the Carolina crowd Friday just before noon--whew, Maryland lost, we get to play Clemson.
But this Clemson is different from January Clemson or even February Clemson. This Clemson looks to have the pieces to be a reasonable competitor in the ACC next year behind Oliver Purnell.
This Clemson played well enough to win--for about 33 minutes. That was when Roy Williams's message began to sink in. Jawad Williams got a steal and a 3-point play. Melvin Scott forced a turnover. Rashad McCants, in the midst of a 13-point triumphant return, sprawled on the floor to pick up a loose ball.
Suddenly, what had been a somewhat listless ACC Tournament--Greensboro has nothing to worry about when it comes to staging this event, as some fans spent upwards of 90 minutes trying to find a parking place and it's almost an afterthought in a metro area--was coming to life. Wake Forest fans and Clemson fans were banding together to root on the Tigers in the corner of the MCI Center nearest the Carolina contingent. It was just like the old days: seven schools, no, eight schools, no, 10 schools joining forces to root for a plucky underdog (and against Carolina, of course).
It's been a long time since the Heels have been in that situation. It seems like such ancient history that even Roy Williams misspoke after the game, saying that none of his players had ever won an ACC Tournament game. That's not quite true, but the Heels' win over Maryland in the 2003 event does seem like it was played before they cut the bottoms out of the peach baskets.
That was all raw talent, athletes still learning how to become basketball players. Early Friday, it looked like they still might be learning.
But by the time there had shaved the deficit to 74-72 on a Felton three-pointer, it was obvious: Carolina was going to win the game. So confident were the Heels that they went right for a knockout punch, a lob to Rashad McCants that didn't work. But it didn't matter. The outcome was clear. Clemson players seemed to shy away from the ball, Carolina players hungered for it.
In the end, it was up to Jesse Holley, who went to the chalkboard in the Tar Heel locker room after the game and wrote the following sentence:
"Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard."
Lesson learned.
Calmly.
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.
