University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Cold Snap
February 5, 2010 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Feb. 5, 2010
By Adam Lucas
BLACKSBURG, Va.--In the long view, it's not Carolina's 74-70 defeat at Virginia Tech that's the problem. Not this one. This one was a real, competitive, edge-of-your-seat Atlantic Coast Conference basketball game, the kind you don't always see every time anymore. It was a pair of Tar Heels--Will Graves and Marcus Ginyard--getting their ankles retaped in the second half and then returning to action without a pause. It was Larry Drew II taking a charge, coming up a little gimpy, then lobbying to stay in the game. It was even David Wear, who nailed a big three-pointer from the corner and even woofed a little as the ball swished through the net.
Sometimes, you lose games like this. Virginia Tech played like a desperate team, and they were a desperate team with veteran players who knew how to handle the closing minutes. Losing games like this will happen.
It's the already-created hole that's the problem. The games that weren't floor-scraping competitive, the occasions when the Tar Heels seemed to slumber through multiple possessions on both offense and defense. It's great to watch two hours of pulsating basketball...but it also reminds you of what's been missing in some of the others.
Enough about that, because you can't get those back. What about this one?
"It was a heck of a basketball game," said Roy Williams. "It was two teams trying awfully hard. Our team competed harder than we've been doing. We played with much more intensity tonight."
Indeed, the Tar Heels played well enough to be right there at the end against a tough Hokie team and 9,847 screaming, Seth Greenberg-towel waving fans. That competitiveness carried Carolina right up until the final minutes, when it was time to convert the effort into making plays.
The Tar Heels couldn't do it. In one three-minute stretch with just under six minutes remaining and the Hokie bulge cut to three points, Carolina turned the ball over on three of five possessions. It's almost impossible to make the kind of comeback that was needed on the road without even getting a shot on three of five possessions.
"In the second half, it hurt us that we had a couple of silly, unforced turnovers," Williams said.
One of those came with 2:30 remaining and Carolina trying to cut a 67-64 Tech lead. Hokie heartbeat Malcolm Delaney was playing with four fouls, and a switch near the top of the key left Delaney defending Ed Davis and the bigger--but less mobile--J.T. Thompson on Drew. The possibilities seemed endless. Get the ball to Davis, and Delaney had to let him go unchecked to the hoop. That would be an easy two points. If, by chance, Delaney did commit a foul, it would disqualify him from the game and eliminate the Hokies' best free throw shooter. In almost any permutation, the Tar Heels were about to draw even closer.
Drew recognized what was happening. "I knew Delaney had four fouls," he said. "Most likely, Ed was going to do something good."
For just a second, Davis had Delaney pinned on his hip. But just as Drew released the pass, Delaney darted around and knocked the ball free. On the other end, Jeff Allen scored to take the lead to five in an important four-point turnaround.
That's how thin the margin is for the 13-9 Tar Heels right now. The effort was there, the play was there, but the execution wasn't.
Don't think about it too long, because if you do you eventually come to this uncomfortable question: in the first week of February, is it progress if the concern shifts from effort to execution? The gut instinct says yes, but the calendar is getting dangerously short.
"I've got to make a better pass there," Drew said. "The whole second half, we just didn't have much flow. We couldn't get into a rhythm. To do that, you've got to get some easy baskets and keep scoring."
In fact, Carolina's biggest offensive weapon was the free throw, as they made as many from the charity stripe (11) as they did field goals in the second half.
"We competed the whole game, and that's good," said David Wear, who finished with 12 points as part of a freshman outburst that included John Henson's 14. "But it should have never come down to those last couple minutes. It felt like we started pressing and we started thinking we needed to get quicker shots, and those shots weren't good shots."
Maybe the snow always comes this way and the wind always blows frigid in February. But as Carolina sits at 2-5 in the ACC with a trip into a blizzard at Maryland on Sunday, winter has never felt colder.
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.
