University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: The More You Know
December 2, 2009 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Dec. 2, 2009
By Adam Lucas
Late last week, assistant coach C.B. McGrath and Larry Drew II were chatting about Michigan State.
"I can tell you the first play they're going to run," McGrath told Drew.
"You sure about that?" a skeptical Drew asked.
"One hundred percent sure. Guaranteed," McGrath said.
Flash forward to Tuesday night. Carolina gets a Deon Thompson basket on its first possession. Michigan State takes the ball and calls a play. Not just a play. The play. The same one McGrath told Drew they would run. Every screen was well-defended. Every attempt at penetration was cut off. The Spartans ran 20 seconds off the shot clock before the ball got close to the paint.
Eventually, as the shot clock approached 10 seconds, the Smith Center crowd of over 21,000 began roaring. Drew ended up man-to-man against Kalin Lucas 35 feet from the basket and forced him into a running left-handed scoop shot with three seconds on the shot clock. Thanks to the shot-blocking presence of Ed Davis, the shot missed. And the tone was set for the rest of the 89-82 victory.
Roy Williams often says, "I've got the best staff in the country." It's one of those things you expect a head coach to say. But he always follows it up with, "And I really believe that." If you've learned one thing about Williams over these last six-plus seasons, it's this: he doesn't waste time saying the politically correct thing. If he repeats something as many times as he has the sentence about his staff, it just might be true.
Carolina has faced Michigan State three times in the past 12 months. McGrath has had scouting duties for every one of those games--for each opponent, a Tar Heel assistant has the primary "scout," which means they're responsible for preparing the team scouting report and briefing Williams and the players on favorite offensive and defensive sets plus individual tendencies. As he's prepared for those three contests, McGrath estimates he's watched about 15 complete Spartan games.
It shows.
Dean Smith once had a coaching staff that consisted of Bill Guthridge, Eddie Fogler and Roy Williams. Guthridge was the cagey veteran, Fogler and Williams were just young coaches trying to watch and learn. Sure, there was a feeling they might have potential, but no one thought it might be a bench full of eventual National Coach of the Year winners (Smith, Guthridge, Fogler and Williams all eventually claimed that prize).
Everyone knows Robinson is a capable head coach, because he proved it at Florida State, one of the toughest places to win in the ACC. No one is engraving future trophies for McGrath and Jerod Haase just yet, but watch them work (along with Joe Holladay, who this year moved to the director of operations job after a stellar two decades with Williams) and you start to suspect this might be a staff that can at least compete with Smith's dream team.
On the Spartans' final possession of the first half, Michigan State had the opportunity to hold for the last shot. With over 25 seconds left, Haase slid over next to Williams, who was standing and watching his team defend.
"Coach, we've got a foul to give," Haase told the head coach. He was exactly right--the Tar Heels had just five team fouls, which meant they could thwart an offensive set with a non-shooting foul if necessary. Some coaches prefer to go ahead and commit that foul to get a look at what the other team is running and force them to execute twice. In this instance, Williams chose not to foul. But his decision doesn't really matter. An assistant coach's job is to provide the information that enables the head coach to make an informed decision. That's what Haase did. One day, he and McGrath will be the ones making the decisions.
Providing information is also the centerpiece of McGrath's Spartan scouting reports. He can watch an infinite amount of tapes, but it doesn't matter if he knows their tendencies. It only matters if he can communicate it to the rest of the coaching staff and the players. For three straight Tar Heel wins over MSU, he's done that very effectively. Carolina's first-half burst in the national title game was fueled by a defense that snuffed almost every Spartan offensive attempt. Tuesday was more of the same.
"For the first four minutes of the game when I was on the bench next to him, every play they called, C.B. would say what they were going to do," said Tyler Zeller. "They run a lot of sets. And as a player if you know a screen is coming, you can get in the right position earlier, and you also know where the player using the screen is trying to go."
Michigan State shot 2-for-20 from the three-point line. Some of that is attributable to a simple bad shooting night. But some of it is also attributable to solid preparation and execution. With just one day to prepare, there was only time for a basic gameplan. It wasn't a case of Carolina committing a dozen Tom Izzo plays to memory. The Tar Heels knew certain Spartans wanted to drive to the basket, while others wanted to shot fake, take a dribble, and release a jumper. They knew MSU wanted to set hard screens and use those screens to get immediate shots.
Armed with that information, Carolina played aggressively and with confidence. The result was the most impressive 40 minutes of the year.
"I wasn't surprised," Drew said of McGrath's bit of fortune-telling last week. "You know what? These coaches, they know what they're doing."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of five books on Carolina basketball, including the just-released book on the 2009 national title, One Fantastic Ride. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
