University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Thursday Bahamas Basketball Notebook
August 12, 2010 | Men's Basketball
Aug. 12, 2010
By Adam Lucas
With no team activities other than meals until the 7:30 tipoff, Thursday brought the best opportunity for Tar Heel players to explore their Nassau resort. Dexter Strickland walked through The Dig, a giant aquarium that is supposedly the world's second largest marine habitat (it trails only Mother Nature, meaning there's not much chance of a switch at the top). Justin Watts and John Henson did some shopping, including perusing watches that cost up to $125,000. No purchases were made. The pair did rent jet skis, though, spending part of their day in the ocean...The team bus passed a native wearing a white number-32 jersey, which of course prompted memories of Rashad McCants and prompted several members of the coaching staff to hold up McCants's signature diamond hand sign...
Congratulations to Sean May, who will get married on Saturday. He joins David Noel as members of the 2005 national champions who have gotten married this summer...Don't always take your Bahamas stats as gospel. Although Leslie McDonald had a solid game on Thursday, the 25 points credited to him were a stretch. Unofficial counts had McDonald with 20 and Harrison Barnes with 28...Bahamas point guard Ollen Smith pulled off the unlikely achievement of amassing four fouls in the first quarter of the game. He was benched and only returned late in the fourth quarter...Carolina opponents shot 109 free throws in the two games here, scoring 78 of their combined 173 points (45.1%) from the charity stripe...
Because of the foul trouble, the Tar Heels broke out some straight 2-3 zone on Thursday night. "I can't remember a time in my life that we did that," Roy Williams said. "But we had to because I didn't know if we were going to have enough players to finish the game because of the foul situation."...Carolina also got in some work offensively against a 2-3 zone, which was used extensively by both opponents. The lack of practice time meant the Tar Heels' instincts were tested. "We had one day where we worked on zone offense for 10 minutes," Williams said. "We want to try and get the ball inside the middle and come back out. We want our posts to continue moving and perimeter players not to pass and stand still. We want them to pass and cut."...
Thursday's crowd was the best of the trip, with a hearty Carolina contingent on a trip set up by Anthony Travel...Perhaps it should have been a warning sign when one of the game officials approached Roy Williams before the game and told him, "When I watch you big guys on TV, I always wonder what it would like to be able to call a technical foul on you." For the record, the official in question was not the one responsible for most of the 56 free throws attempted by the opponents...The Tar Heels donated a good-sized cache of basketballs to Bahamas basketball organizers at the end of the trip...Players will get an early wakeup call Friday morning and return to their hometowns for a few days at home before reassembling in Chapel Hill for the fall semester.
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 upcoming official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
