University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: UNC Basketball Notebook
March 17, 2008 | Men's Basketball
March 17, 2008
By Adam Lucas
The hours following the NCAA Tournament selection show are usually frenzied ones in the Carolina basketball office. The coaching staff must begin the information-gathering process on the first-round opponent--usually a team that's not very familiar to the players and coaches. That's when Eric Hoots and his magical TiVo come into play. The staff records almost every televised basketball game over the course of the season, which means they typically have a handful of games from any potential opponent.
This year, though, the Tar Heels won't officially know Friday's opponent until 48 hours after the bracket is revealed, because they're waiting out the result of Tuesday's play-in game between Coppin State and Mount St. Mary's. So what have they done in the interim? "Today I've been working on what hotel we'll stay at, when we'll practice, the ticket situation, and all that garbage," Roy Williams said Monday afternoon. Williams and his staff also spent two hours grading Sunday's game tape.
The team has an off day from practice Monday and will only lift weights on Tuesday since the Smith Center is being used for the campus-wide Eve Carson memorial...An unsung hero of the ACC Tournament championship was assistant coach Jerod Haase. Assistant coaches are assigned scouting duties on the same teams they scouted during the regular season. The way the brackets unfolded, Haase had the scouting assignments on all three Tournament foes--FSU, Virginia Tech, and Clemson...
The UNC open practice at the RBC Center on Thursday will be at 4:25 p.m. The practice is open to the public. The session, which is just 40 minutes long, will renew the annual folly over the NCAA allowing teams 40 minutes to practice but requiring them to be available to the media for nearly as long (30 minutes). To compensate for the abbreviated practice time, Carolina will practice in Chapel Hill Thursday before making the trip to Raleigh. "It'll be a little different atmosphere (than the team's trip to Raleigh earlier this season)," a deadpan Tyler Hansbrough said. "We probably won't see as many State fans."...To make sure the event has an NCAA Tournament feel, the team will stay in a Triangle-area hotel over the weekend...You weren't the only one caught in a post-ACC Tournament traffic jam. Because of Charlotte traffic, the Tar Heels had to scuttle plans to watch the NCAA selection show in Greensboro. Instead, they made a surprise stop at the Lexington Applebee's...
Last year at this time Brandan Wright was fielding a question about his post-NCAA plans at virtually every press conference. Those same queries have been blessedly limited for Tyler Hansbrough, although the National Player of the Year did get one Monday. "I'm not going to make that decision here," he said. "But a big reason I came back is for times like these." Hansbrough cited the reception given to the 1982 and 1957 teams at last year's Wake Forest game as a motivating March factor. "I noticed the bond they have and how they are perceived around here," he said. "It would be nice to be in their position."...
Alex Stepheson entered the ACC Tournament having never made a postseason field goal. He quickly obliterated that trend with three field goals against Florida State and two against Clemson...A recent study took a different look at the NCAA bracket and Carolina came out on top again. UNC was the only one of the top four seeds to graduate at least 50 percent of its players. Carolina's 86 percent rate was easily the best of Tournament-bound ACC teams. The next-closest league squad was Miami at 73 percent. Duke and Clemson rounded out the ACC entries at 67 percent and 31 percent, respectively...
A timely conversation between Roy Williams and Ty Lawson helped earn Carolina's 17th ACC Tournament title. "I was scared of going into the lane because I was scared of getting hurt again," Lawson admitted after the win over Clemson. But with 12 minutes left in the second half, Williams encouraged him to leave the pain behind.
"He said I could do it and to play hard and not think about it," Lawson said. "That's what I did, and it felt better."
"He has to be confident enough in what he can do," Williams said. "If he does that our team will be better. I grabbed him and said, `You will make your next shot.' I told him I had coached a lot of games, and I knew what I was talking about."
Lawson scored 8 of his 12 points after the late-game conversation.
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of four books on Carolina basketball.
