University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: UNC Basketball Mailbag March 8
March 8, 2005 | Men's Basketball
March 8, 2005
By Adam Lucas
It's time for the Mailbag's annual ACC honors. As we do every year, we're reprinting our All-ACC ballot here for everyone to read, make fun of, and generally cast doubts upon our level of intelligence.
All-ACC teams were released yesterday, while the All-Freshman and All-Defensive teams will be announced today along with the Defensive Player of the Year. Rookie of the Year will be announced March 14, Coach of the Year on March 15, and Player of the Year on March 16. Despite the fact that they won't be announced until next week, ballots for those honors were due Sunday night, so ACC Tournament performances should have no impact on those awards.
First, freshman of the year: Marvin Williams. If he's not a unanimous selection the FBI should investigate.
Defensive player of the year: Jackie Manuel. See above (even though he won't be unanimous).
All-ACC first team: Sean May, Raymond Felton, J.J. Redick, Shelden Williams, and Chris Paul. We don't really understand how anyone could argue with any of those five selections.
All-ACC second team: Jawad Williams, Guillermo Diaz, Julius Hodge, Justin Gray, Eric Williams. The one likely to raise the most eyebrows here is Jawad Williams--you have to watch him play every game to appreciate what he does for the Tar Heels. It wouldn't be surprising if he slips to third team for that reason.
All-ACC third team: Robert Hite, Rashad McCants, John Gilchrist, Daniel Ewing, Zabian Dowdell. Here's where things get a little crazy. We had no idea what to do with Gilchrist. He's been very up and down this year but was in the top 20 in the ACC in scoring and rebounding, top 3 in assists, and top 2 in assist/turnover ratio. Plus, there's just something about the way he plays that we like. So he's on our team. The other odd pick here is Dowdell. He's in the top 20 in scoring, top 15 in assists, top 10 in steals, leading the league in three-point percentage (Redick is fourth if you're keeping score at home), and quite honestly we just felt like we needed a Hokie somewhere on the roster as an acknowledgement of their surprising season. The most significant omission: Jarrett Jack. Ultimately, his 1.28 assist/turnover ratio (11th in the league) kept him off our ballot, because that's an important stat for a point guard. But we could certainly understand why he'd be on some lists.
Player of the Year: Sean May. Quite honestly, we don't think he's going to win. Too many people decided midway through the year they were going to vote for Redick and a significant amount of voters (about 20%) turned in their ballots before Sunday's Duke-Carolina game. But we like our Players of the Year to do more than one thing well. Redick is a terrific shooter, one of the best in the country. But he has 58 assists this year--in other words, only eight more than May, who doesn't play guard. May has been phenomenal over the closing stretch of the season, but we believe it hurts his candidacy that he's not a guard. Redick takes crazy shots that find the net--those are "wow" types of shots, especially for writers (who vote on the award) who can relate more to three-pointers than to being a big man and banging in the post. May doesn't make "wow" shots if you don't understand basketball.
Coach of the Year: Roy Williams. Here's another one where our pick won't win. It was exactly one hour after the game when we heard our first voter say they couldn't vote for Williams because he "had all that talent." Didn't Gary Williams have everyone back from last year's ACC Tournament champs? How did that work out? How about Paul Hewitt with essentially the same roster that went to the national championship game last year? There's this popular misconception that if you have talent you just roll it out there and sit on the bench drawing pictures on your clipboard. In some cases, however, it's harder to get a team with a lot of talent to mesh than it is to get a less-talented team to overachieve. The likely winner of this award, Mike Krzyzewski, has benefited from the perception that the Blue Devils had no talent this year. That's correct, if you consider five McDonald's All-Americans (it should be six, but Shelden Williams wasn't eligible) no talent. Carolina had, let's see, five McDonald's All-Americans. So which is it? Is that "all that talent" or "no talent?" Can it be both? And how do we reconcile the fact that Duke had two players on our first-team All-ACC ballot, three on our first three All-ACC teams, with "not enough talent?"
We've also heard the "Duke overachieved" line of reasoning. We do think they've been much tougher than we expected this year. But they were picked fourth in the preseason and finished third. Carolina was picked second and finished first while playing the last four games without their best outside scorer, a fact which almost no one seems to acknowledge.
So there's our ballot. We've always been in favor of making the All-ACC voting public because we think you'd see some very strange things (do you think the 10 people who left Sean May off their first team would be willing to have their identities known?), but until that happens, we'll continue to reveal ours to anyone who asks.
Don't forget that Tuesday is Tar Heel Talk day from 12-1 on 1090 AM and live on the internet. Jones Angell and some other guy will talk ACC Tournament and the Heels for a full hour, and we'll also have Jerry Palm of CollegeRPI.com on the show to try and sort out bubbles, brackets, and seedings.
We almost forgot to do a Rashad McCants update. From the mouth of Roy Williams on Monday afternoon: "I believe that as long as Rashad is out, when he gets to the point he can practice I think he needs several days. I don't know what number to put on several. He's just been out a long time."
McCants has not yet been cleared to practice by the doctors. If he's able to shoot around this afternoon and feels good after that, one hurdle will be cleared and he's much closer to being cleared by the doctors. He should know much more about his condition by later this week and for that reason there is no answer to the "Will he play in the ACC Tournament?" question, no matter how many times you send it to us.
Some of the conspiracy theories we've received in the inbox about McCants have been almost comical. Think about how much you want him to return and then multiply it by about 1,000. That's how much he wants to be back on the floor, and he will be eventually. But it would be a disservice to everyone involved to put him back on the court when he's not physically capable of contributing. Then the questions would turn from "When's he coming back?" to "Why did you rush him back?" Also, please keep in mind that there are privacy regulations involved any time it's a medical situation, and even if there weren't, we wouldn't feel comfortable broadcasting someone's medical records.
A lot of attention has been given to Sean May's run of double-doubles (and rightly so), but I also am curious as to the double-double run that Raymond Felton seems to be on. It seems to me that he has had one in at least three of the last four games, if not more. What's Raymond been doing lately in this area, and how many does he have for the year?
Marshall Benbow, Greensboro, NC
Felton finished the regular season with five double-doubles, including two in the last three games. He scored in double figures in the final 16 games of the season.
Felton had four double-doubles as a freshman, including three in the postseason, and two as a sophomore. For the sake of comparison, Ed Cota had three points/assist double-doubles during the 1997-98 season and 13 for his career.
Roy Williams and the Tar Heels this year have stepped up their D without question. However, are Roy and Co. concerned after allowing 48% shooting to Florida State and a big 52% to Duke in the final two regular season games of the year? Sounds more like shades of last year's defensive preformances. If they aren't concerned, should we be?
Drew Wilson, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
As Roy Williams is fond of saying, coaches have a habit of being concerned about everything. So, yes, he's concerned. And you should probably be concerned too, because that's what fans do.
Your numbers are a little off--Duke shot 46.4% from the field. But the point is the same, and you could even back it up a little bit further than two games: against Maryland the Terps shot 48.6% in the second half, 42.3% for the game. And against NC State the Pack shot 46.7% in the second half, 45.3% for the game. Over the last four games, in fact, opponents are shooting 45.4% (109-240) from the floor. That's five percentage points better than Carolina's defensive field goal percentage so far this year, which was under 40 percent just three weeks ago. Opponents have shot at least 40 percent from the field in four straight games--that's the first time this year that's happened.
A four-game sample is probably too many to just explain it away as "The Heels are running into some hot teams." So what else has been going on in those four games?
Rashad McCants has been missing. Finally, after three years, we have here some black-and-white evidence that the defensive knocks on him aren't always accurate. It's pretty simple: Carolina is a better defensive team with him in the lineup. He's got the athleticism to defend guards on the perimeter but enough muscle to prevent them from any forays into the lane. Also, in his absence the minutes for everyone else in the rotation have gone up, which can lead to more fatigue--perhaps one step too late closing out on a jump shot, one step slower getting around a screen. You're also removing a big piece of the puzzle from Carolina's offense. Opposing wings who might wear down guarding McCants don't have to exert as much energy defending Melvin Scott, who is primarily a three-point shooter. Less effort on defense translates to more energy on the offensive end and more successful scoring opportunities.
I'm sure that by the time the mailbag rolls around next week it will be full of questions about the big Senior Day victory, Damion Grant, Rashad's intestines, and the postseason tournaments, but I hope you can squeeze me in. It is my understanding that among the various reasons a Carolina jersey could be "honored" in the rafters is the player is named a first or second team All-American. Does ESPN's All-American list including Sean May count or does it have to be the AP's teams?
Casey Hammontree, Chattanooga, TN
The jersey honoring rules state that the All-American selection has to be to a "generally recognized team." It seems unlikely that ESPN.com's picks will count, because that's a fairly recent creation. But with the wave of national attention he's received for his closing stretch of the season, we'd be surprised if he didn't work his way onto the first- or second-team of a more accepted team.
Where do you think this comeback ranks in the annals of the Carolina-Duke rivalry?
Bryant Welch, Austin, TX
If the category is comebacks, the unquestioned king will always be 8 points in 17 seconds (with no 3-point line) in 1974.
Beyond that, other Duke-Carolina games that merit a mention include 1995 (Duke leads by 12 in the second half, Carolina wins in double-overtime) and 1996 (down 63-52 with 8:44 left, win 73-72 on Dante Calabria's tip-in). There haven't been as many true comebacks on the Carolina side in this series because it seems like the games are always close--a 3- or 4-point lead seems like a huge margin.
For that reason, and considering the fact that it was senior day for an extraordinary group of seniors and the game clinched the ACC championship outright, we'd place coming back from 9 points in 3 minutes as the second-best Tar Heel comeback against the Blue Devils.
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.
