University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Finding Fear
January 17, 2007 | Men's Basketball
Jan. 17, 2007
By Adam Lucas
CLEMSON--These are the things that drive big wins:
Competitiveness. Motivation. Talent. Coaching.
And fear. Maybe just a little bit of fear.
"Fear set in a little bit after Virginia Tech," Danny Green said.
That's obvious, you're thinking. They were scared of Roy Williams. Scared he might run them, scared he might trim their playing time.
That's not it. And that's why Carolina picked up a critical 77-55 victory at Clemson Wednesday night.
"What kind of fear was it?" Green said. "I think it was fear of losing. We knew how we had played against Virginia Tech. We knew if we kept playing that way we were not going to get the results we want."
That's exactly right. And it's exactly what you wanted to hear one of the Tar Heels say. There are times that a college basketball season seems very long. That's how this team has treated it for much of this season. Everyone wants to talk about their youth, but it doesn't show the most on the court. It's been showing off the court, in the way they always seemed to assume another chance to make up for a mistake was coming. Lose a drill? No problem, use a plus point. Lose a game? No problem, another one's coming.
A player with no fear is supposedly someone to be praised. But doesn't there have to be a little bit of fear? A little bit of worry about failing to reach potential or letting down teammates? About missing an opportunity--not just in a game, but in a season?
This is what Carolina saw when they watched the film of the Virginia Tech game:
"Two minutes into the game all five guys on defense were standing up," Marcus Ginyard said. "We had worked on playing the ball screen, hedging out, and sprinting back. And we weren't sprinting back. No one was boxing out. It was ugly."
Williams's message to the team was simple: "If that's not the most disappointed I've been in my 19 years as a head coach, it's close to it."
What followed were two of the toughest practices of the season. On Monday, everyone ran.
On Tuesday, after the Blue team had used six defenders to simulate Clemson's press against the White team, the losers ran. In an end-of-practice offense/defense game, the White team ran up a 10-1 victory. In Carolina basketball terms, it was the equivalent of this year's Florida Atlantic game.
The punishment? A 68. That's six times the length of the court, and then six times back. All in 68 seconds. If you think it sounds easy, give it a try--but make sure you've played two hours of thigh-burning defense before you start.
"We had to do a lot of running," said Wes Miller, who was on that losing Blue squad. "A whole lot. And that hammered into everyone's head that you can't play that way. You can't allow yourself to be beaten that way. Not on this team."
Williams gathered his team for the last time in the locker room with approximately eight minutes until tipoff Wednesday night. These are the moments he loves. A sellout crowd roaring for blood outside, complete silence in the visiting locker room, all eyes at the front. This is when a team is truly a team.
This is what he said: "I don't want to talk about winning or losing. I want to go out there and compete. I want everyone to play with your head. If you do that, I'll be fine with whatever the outcome is."
Fear leads to playing desperately. Which is how Reyshawn Terry was able to use that wiry frame coaches have been begging him to use defensively to knock away a pass to Clemson's K.C. Rivers early in the first half. Rivers, Clemson's leading scorer and a prototypical Carolina-killer, was standing wide open in the right corner. To him, this probably looked easy--just like what he had seen on film from the Tar Heels against the Hokies.
But then Terry swatted the ball away, and a message was sent. This Carolina team was not here to win. They were here to compete.
Later in the half, with Miller at point guard, Carolina switched to the point zone for one of the first times this season. He's been in Chapel Hill for all four of Williams's seasons, so he knew exactly what the coaches expected from the zone: communication. Sometimes a zone lulls defenders to sleep and they stop moving their feet. Miller never stopped. He chopped his feet, and when his man caught the ball, he shouted, "Point!" so loudly you could hear it above every orange-wig wearing Tiger fan in Littlejohn.
That's exactly how you play the point zone. You want textbook? You'll find it in the glossary of Dean Smith's Multiple Offense and Defense.
Three minutes later, Green was on the receiving end of a vicious dunk from Cliff Hammonds. They showed it six times on the Littlejohn video boards, a different angle every time. Each time, the crowd got louder. The Tigers had closed the deficit to 35-29. Surely the Tar Heels were cowed. Surely now the run would come. On Saturday the same type of emotion washed over Carolina and kept getting louder and louder and turnovers led to three-pointers until they looked up and were suddenly down 23 points.
This time, it was different. This time, style points and dunks weren't important. The Tar Heels looked steely-eyed instead of wide-eyed, and this time turnovers led to defensive stops and the noise just seemed like a fun soundtrack to a victory.
Carolina closed the half on a 9-2 sprint and eventually stretched it to a 17-4 blitz over two halves.
"We had to live with ourselves for three or four days after Virginia Tech," Miller said. "And what a lot of guys found out was that they didn't like feeling that way."
You know what? They might have been so young that they didn't know that before.
Now they know. And it scares them.
Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.
