University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Don't Let The Baby Blue Fool You
March 26, 2011 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
March 26, 2011
By Adam Lucas
NEWARK--Quantifying toughness isn't easy. College basketball isn't a boxing match, so it's not as if you can watch a team play through a bloody lip. In most cases, the characteristic of toughness is assigned to winning teams. That makes sense. Toughness is a quality most of us admire, so we want to believe it's present in the best of us.
But the common belief seems to be that toughness and skill are mutually exclusive. You can have toughness. Or you can have skill. But at least in basketball, you usually don't have both.
Anyone who has followed Carolina Basketball for any length of time knows exactly which one the Tar Heels are usually considered to have--skill. Carolina is a running team, which is sometimes a synonym for a pretty team. And pretty isn't tough.
Carolina and Marquette met with the media for a combined two hours on Thursday afternoon. The Tar Heels were asked so many times about Marquette's toughness that even on Friday night, even after dispatching the Golden Eagles 81-63 in a game not as close as the score indicated, Dexter Strickland still looked a little miffed. There was indeed a certain undercurrent to some of Thursday's tone. You half expected the Tar Heels to ride into the Prudential Center on a golden chariot being fanned by palm fronds.
"We heard a lot about how we were McDonald's All-Americas and they ate at McDonald's," he said. "And I think that motivated us. Like we always say, don't let the baby blue fool you."
The baby blue did not seem to fool Marquette coach Buzz Williams. He's a unique character, one who looks at the game with a different viewpoint than many of his compatriots. He talks about advanced statistics in his press conferences, thinks about points per possession and efficiency. One of his favorite stats is "paint touches." Nobody pretty charts paint touches. That is for tough guys. The paint is where grizzly bears like Tyler Hansbrough live.
"This year we averaged 49 paint touches per game," Williams said. His calculations showed that his team had gotten just 19 paint touches in the first half, which concluded with Carolina holding an incredible 40-15 lead.
So it's up to us, then, to figure out how that happened. How did that team in the snazzy argyle push around the team that was going to outfight them, outwill them?
Buzz knows. "They don't want you to initiate offense, and they pressure you to disturb you to the point that when you do initiate offense, it is either off the dribble or you are trying to initiate the offense way too high on the floor."
What he's saying, in so many words, is that the Tar Heels are pretty tough. Maybe they don't look like it getting off the bus, when Kendall Marshall is usually trying to pull a prank on John Henson or Leslie McDonald is goofing around with Strickland, but when you put them on the court something happens.
Harrison Barnes missed his first four jumpers and didn't look especially comfortable doing it. He finished with 20 points and 9 rebounds, very nearly joining Henson and Tyler Zeller as Tar Heels with double-doubles. How did he play through the early struggles?
"Well," Barnes said, "after going 0-for-12 early in the season a lot doesn't faze me."
It was a funny line, even earning a snicker and a fist bump from Zeller. But beneath the humor, wasn't there a hint of toughness there? Part of toughness is trusting your talent enough to know that adversity isn't permanent.
Marquette was absolutely, positively committed to controlling the tempo against the Tar Heels. They were going to walk the ball up the court and they were going to move the ball around the perimeter and once the shot clock dripped under 15 seconds, they were going to start thinking about shooting it. For the first quarter of this game, the plan worked beautifully. Carolina scored 10 points in the first 10 minutes. Ninety seconds later, something happened. In fact, a pretty play happened--Marshall arched a perfect pass to Henson for an alley-oop slam. The beauty of the possession was almost enough to obscure what had happened just before it (Tar Heel defense that forced a turnover) and what came right after it (a Marshall steal).
"What turned the game is that we started making them turn the ball over," Marshall said. "We did it with defense.
"Marquette is a very good team and very tough. We knew they were going to punch us in the mouth and that's what they did in those first 10 minutes. But we brought a toughness to the game today. Sometimes people see how many points we score and think we just want to run up and down and score. There's more to this team than that."
There's more to this team than almost anyone expected. There are eight teams left with a chance to win the national championship. Carolina is one of them. Dexter, how many games do you have to win before you're officially tough?
"I don't know," he said. "But it seems like we keep proving people wrong."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of six books on Carolina basketball, including the official chronicle of the first 100 years of Tar Heel hoops, A Century of Excellence, which is available now. Get real-time UNC sports updates from the THM staff on Twitter.
