University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Unexpected Endings
March 20, 2010 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
March 20, 2010
By Adam Lucas
STARKVILLE, Miss.--In a place Carolina had never been, in a tournament they never expected to be part of, it seemed fitting that the ending to Saturday's game against Mississippi State would involve an ending you could never anticipate.
The extraordinarily nice people of Starkville made it clear that the second-round NIT visit from the Tar Heels was a big deal. The live bulldog mascot, Bully XX, paraded around the court, pausing for occasional photos. In a town with a population of approximately 21,800, almost half of that figure crammed into Humphrey Coliseum for an 11 a.m. local time game. You expected to see businesses locked up with signs reading, "Closed--gone to game."
The allure of the game was the arrival of North Carolina, creating buzz similar to when Notre Dame football came to Chapel Hill in 2008. What they saw, though, was not a vintage UNC performance. A combination of lazy passing and poor defense prompted perhaps the earliest timeout in the Roy Williams era, as the Tar Heel head coach called one just 2:32 into the first half. His reasoning was simple.
"We didn't come out as intense and they hit us right in the mouth," said Will Graves. That punch gave the Bulldogs a 16-4 lead less than five minutes into the game.
From there, a combination of bad Bulldog shot selection, a Tar Heel youth infusion in the first half that reversed the sloppy start and those late-game heroics combined to send Carolina into Tuesday's third-round game--and the chance to play for the season's second trip to New York City--at UAB (game time will be either 7 or 9 p.m. and will be announced later Saturday night).
Graves's banked three-pointer with 31 seconds remaining was a bail-out bucket, the kind that owes as much to good fortune as to skill.
"We've had some of those against us this year," Roy Williams said, remembering some of the shots tossed in by College of Charleston.
"We were running a play trying to get it inside, and then I had a double screen," Graves said. "I tried to shoot it like I was in practice."
He doesn't usually bank them in practice.
As much as Graves's shot was good luck, Drew's game-winning hoop was pure instinct and skill. The game was tied at 74 with 8.9 seconds remaining; Williams abhors calling a timeout in that situation. His lessons to his point guards have been the same throughout his career: in a tie game, with just seconds left, take the ball as deep to the rim as you can.
That it would be Drew with the ball in his hands somehow made sense. It had been his casual play with 2:30 remaining, when he failed to pick up a loose ball that led to a Mississippi State three-pointer, that necessitated Graves's miracle shot. Now, less than three minutes later, he had the game on his fingertips with the chance to earn the win.
Although the Tar Heels have looked confused in some late-game situations this year, they frequently practice a similar situation. The way they normally do it, the point guard has less than five seconds to drive the ball the length of the court. This time, with a few extra seconds, Drew had the luxury of weaving his way through traffic, then encountering the formidable Jarvis Varnado, a man who has more career blocked shots than Sam Perkins and Brendan Haywood combined and who had already swatted four Tar Heel attempts.
"It was a do or die situation," Drew said. "I got into the paint and I saw Jarvis to the right side. I wanted to get it up there and give it a chance to go in. I just wanted to give it a chance and get it up there soft off the glass."
"He shot it over my guy, didn't he?" Bulldogs coach Rick Stansbury said. "He shot it right over Jarvis, and not many people do that, do they?"
It was the kind of play that was even more remarkable on a second viewing than it was in real time. It was remarkable precisely because of how instinctive it was. That's what it feels like the entire season has been about--trying to get the Tar Heels to the point that the right play, the smart play, is intuitive. Now here was Drew, the point guard who has taken a substantial amount of criticism--often for not creating the kind of tempo the Tar Heels want--and who has sometimes showed a habit of getting to the rim only to pass rather than shoot, prolonging the season with a full-court dash over one of the nation's best shot-blockers.
"Needless to say, we feel very fortunate," Williams said. "We feel very lucky. And this has been the unluckiest year I've had in my entire life."
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.
