University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Handle With Care
March 2, 2007 | Men's Basketball
March 2, 2007
By Adam Lucas
ATLANTA--You go to Marcus Ginyard because it is habit.
You walk into a whisper-quiet Carolina locker room after an 84-77 loss to Georgia Tech. There have been times this year when hanging with the Tar Heels after games has been a joy. Think back to the game at Cameron Indoor Stadium--How long ago was that? A month? A year?--and there was Bobby Frasor beat-boxing in the corner. Really, he was. Danny Green and Deon Thompson and Alex Stepheson were providing the sound effects and Frasor was trying, with limited success, to lay a beat down over the top of it. It was silly and it was crazy and it was something else:
Fun. Remember that, the fun?
That was not happening on Thursday night. Everyone dressed in their own bubble, everyone thinking about passes they threw away, shots they missed, plays they didn't make.
In times like this, quotes are understandably sparse. When you have a bad day at work, do you want to rehash every second of the day? Sure, this is supposed to be play, not work. But right now, in that locker room, for these few minutes, it feels like work. Roy Williams usually tells his teams to enjoy wins until midnight. Losses linger later than midnight. Losses settle like smog over the team plane. Losses are heavy.
So you go to Ginyard. It is both his blessing and his curse to be eloquent in times like this. A blessing because he has a unique way of dissecting games that makes him a great quote. A curse because the Tar Heels just lost a 7-point game, he is standing at his locker half-dressed, and there are a crowd of men with tape recorders standing around him in a semicircle.
But when you get there, you find something stunning. You find him pausing before every answer. You find him saying, "What's the word I'm looking for here?" as he attempts to describe what has caused this two-game losing streak.
This is not Ginyard. But it is the perfect microcosm of this team. The Tar Heels are 24-6 and ranked in the nation's top ten.
But right this minute, they are as fragile as your grandmother's antique vase. On the court, you watch them think, not play. Where do I go? What do I do? Is this right?
When they play, they are fun to watch. Ty Lawson didn't start Thursday's game after a terrible practice on Wednesday. The stat sheet says he had 8 assists and 3 turnovers. Forget about all that.
For the last six minutes of the game, he played defense like he hasn't played all year. He got down in a stance and he moved his feet and he denied the ball and he harassed the ball-handler and he competed. For six minutes, he made life very difficult on the perimeter for the Yellow Jackets. He took a Carolina team that had been forced to go to the much-despised zone just to slow the Tech onslaught in the first half and turned them into a bunch of defensive demons.
"That stretch was probably the best defense I have played all year," Lawson said. "We were down, it was late, and we needed something to change. We needed a stop. So I wanted to pressure the ball as much as I could. We needed urgency."
So he gets it. Kind of. Yes, the Tar Heels needed urgency. Here's the next step: find that same desperation before falling behind. Find it in the first half. Find it before tip-off. Find it in the tunnel before taking the floor.
"This has been the toughest stretch of my career," Lawson said. "Of course. We're losing, so things aren't good. The last couple of days we've been trying to figure things out. We're losing so many games."
So many games. Six, total, this year.
"What have we lost?" Lawson asked. "Three in a row now?"
Well, two.
"I don't think we've been on a two-game win streak in a month. We win one, then we lose one."
Tell the truth. How long do you really think it's been since Carolina won two in a row? Go ahead, guess.
It seems like a long time, right?
It was last week. One week ago today the Tar Heels were coming off a big road win over Boston College and a home victory over NC State. They were talking ACC regular season title, ACC Tournament title, and NCAA Tournament.
Now they are talking about getting some help to win the regular season crown and avoiding dreaded Thursday games in Tampa.
So that explains why Marcus Ginyard is choosing his words so carefully. When things aren't going well, everything is magnified. You want to know what's really going on with Carolina basketball?
On Tuesday, Ginyard told a handful of writers he thought last year's team could beat this year's squad. He had his reasons--and, perhaps to the chagrin of some Tar Heels, he elaborated on them. That eventually prompted a clear-the-air team meeting.
Tuesday night, Tyler Hansbrough spent the entire night throwing up. On Wednesday he was hospitalized until 3 p.m. and narrowly made the team plane to Atlanta. That same day, Lawson went through perhaps the worst practice of his Carolina career. Then they played a game, dropping a second straight ACC contest. Thursday night, Hansbrough was so spooked by the prospect of a potentially bumpy flight home that he elected to make the 6-hour bus ride with Dave Harder rather than take the team plane. In doing so, he avoided perhaps the worst team flight of all time, one that ended with Roy Williams pronouncing, "Tyler Hansbrough is the smartest person of all of us," when the aircraft mercifully came to a stop at RDU. At that moment, at least one Tar Heel was getting sick in the back of the plane.
Now, are you sure you really want to know?
"I felt like I stirred up a little too much the other day," Ginyard said. "I felt like I might have had something to do with the attitudes, because some guys might have gotten mad at what I said. I was disappointed in myself. I've got to be more careful."
He shrugged, as if the wisdom everyone was waiting for was not forthcoming. Right now, with only senior day left before the postseason, the platitudes were exhausted.
"We've got to get this team back on track," he said. "We've got to."
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.
