University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Mystery Men
February 4, 2009 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Feb. 4, 2009
By Adam Lucas
It is Feb. 3, 22 games into the season, 109 days after the first practice of the 2008-09 season. Here is what we know: Carolina can score.
Here is what we don't know: Everything else.
That realization arrived somewhere around the middle of Carolina's 108-91 defeat of Maryland Tuesday night. Here we are, closer to spring than fall, and even the closest Tar Heel hoops observer would be hard-pressed to say that they know more about this year's team than they did in October.
Here, let's ask Wayne Ellington, he of the incredible 34 points. Wayne, what was the identity of last year's team?
"We knew it after a couple games. We knew we were a tough team. We knew if you were going to beat us you were going to have to play a great game. We could grind it out if we had to. We got it done."
OK. What about your freshman year? By this point in the season, what did you know about that team?
"We had so many freshmen and we were so young. At times, we were just out there."
You didn't need Ellington to tell you that, of course, because you had a feel for both of those teams by this point in the year. This season? Well, let's ask him.
"That's tough to say," he said. "We think we've found it and then it changes. It's an unusual situation. We find it, then we're not sure again, then we think we find it."
Part of the issue is the revolving door of personnel. Get Bobby Frasor healthy, lose Tyler Hansbrough. Get Hansbrough healthy, lose Tyler Zeller. Lose Marcus Ginyard, get Ginyard back, lose him again. Not one single time this season has the actual team Roy Williams thought he would have in 2008-09 taken the floor for a full practice. In most cases, at least two members of that team have been missing.
This was supposed to be the team that had a seventh, eighth, and ninth man more talented than every opponent. That would have been a nice identity to have, but the full roster hasn't been available for any game, and it won't be for the remainder of the year.
Tomorrow, Ginyard and Will Graves--both of whom are gone for the year, Ginyard to redshirt and Graves to suspension--will be gone. Zeller sees the doctor tomorrow, which means a decision on him could be forthcoming. At that point, barring further developments, everyone will know who's available and who isn't. The certainty will be comforting.
At that point, the question becomes what the remaining healthy bodies decide to do with the adversity. Do they decide it's a hassle, that they're ready to be finished with it? Or do they use it as fuel?
"This is an excellent opportunity to show what type of character this Carolina basketball team has," Ginyard said. "There are a lot of things that happen throughout the year with injuries and everything is not going to go your way and every championship team has been able to find a way to get through those things and persevere."
He's right. The question is how his teammates will handle it. This is a group capable of embarrassing some of the best teams in the country, of beating Michigan State as badly as they've ever been beaten in the Tom Izzo era. But it's also a team capable of inexplicably forgetting to get back on defense, as they did multiple times against the Terps. No matter who's hurt, no matter who's on the court, a team with multiple members who have spent multiple years around Williams should never have that kind of repeated defensive breakdown.
"That can't happen," Ty Lawson said. Well, of course not. That's why Williams called a timeout and simply stared at his team, then stepped out of the huddle. It can't happen, not to a team stocked with upperclassmen. What makes it happen?
Answer that, and you'll have pierced the mystery of this team's identity. It's quite a conundrum. This team can be dazzling on both offense and defense. At times, they have been. But right now, even the players involved realize they haven't done it frequently enough to earn a trademark.
"Right now, our identity is that we score a lot but we have to pick it up on the defensive end," Lawson said. "It's not that we're slack, but we don't rotate real well. And that lets them score 91 points like tonight."
Lawson said those words matter-of-factly in a victorious locker room that was strangely quiet--no music, no shouting, very little laughing. North Carolina is the third-ranked team in America. They have 20 wins and the groundhog has barely looked for his shadow. At 93.1 points per game, they are on pace to become the highest-scoring Tar Heel team of all-time.
And still, they are looking for something.
"We haven't had that click, that gel," Ellington said. "It happens when you get that feeling that guys know each other a little bit better. In the next couple of games, we're going to find it."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of four books on Carolina basketball.
