University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: A Team Like This
March 27, 2011 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
March 27, 2011
By Adam Lucas
NEWARK--"Has Carolina ever had a team like this?"
Assistant coach Jerod Haase was in Carolina's team hotel on Saturday, an inch-thick stack of papers in his hand that contained the Kentucky scouting report (nowhere in there did it mention they were planning to hit 12 of their 22 three-pointers in an excruciating payback for the 1995 regional final, when Dean Smith dared Rick Pitino's Wildcats to hit from outside and they couldn't). That was the first thing he said as soon as he got off the elevator. There was no context whatsoever to the comment. He just got off the elevator, turned, and said it, as if he'd been pondering it on the way down from his room.
Haase has even more history with Roy Williams than he has with Carolina, so what he said next was meaningful. "I don't know about Carolina, but in terms of Coach Williams' teams, there's never been one like this. Not with this kind of chemistry. This group doesn't know what they're not supposed to be able to do."
The 2006 team is the patron saint of Tar Heel teams that surprised us. They went from nowhere in the preseason to Senior Day spoilers by the end of the year, but they also did it over the course of a full season. On Jan. 16 of this year, the 2011 Tar Heels were 12-5, a projected eight seed in Joe Lunardi's Bracketology, and receiving exactly two votes in the Associated Press poll (and you had to doubt the credentials of those voters). That was just 70 days ago. Even on Feb. 4, Carolina was 16-5, a projected 5 seed, and ranked 23rd. That was 51 days ago.
I feel a little cheated. We got only 51 days to watch this team play. And at the same time, 51 days was enough to completely change the way we think about them. John Henson transformed into the ACC Defensive Player of the Year and the National Defensive Player of the Year by multiple voters. Harrison Barnes heard students chant "O-ver-rated" at him in several ACC venues earlier this year. Now we'll remember his freshman year as one of the most clutch seasons in Carolina history. How clutch? As his teammates gathered around a television last week watching the NCAA Tournament, they watched live as Morehead State's Demonte Harper sent Louisville home with a three-pointer with 4.2 seconds left. Their immediate reaction: "That looked like one of Harrison's!"
Dexter Strickland and Reggie Bullock persevered through knee injuries before Bullock required surgery. Justin Knox went from afterthought in a football town to necessity in a basketball town.
It's not fun to look at Kendall Marshall in tears in the locker room, eyes red and bottom lip quivering as he tries to get out the words, "We didn't want our season to end." But it's thrilling to imagine Roy Williams sitting down James McAdoo and P.J. Hairston this summer and saying, "This is your point guard. He's exactly what we want and what we need." It's encouraging to imagine what a healthy Dexter Strickland could do--if the Tar Heels had beaten Kentucky, we'd know this game as "The Dexter Game." He was that good, offensively and defensively.
That scene in the locker room was unbearable, as season-ending locker rooms always are. As Marshall tried to answer questions, Barnes sat next to him, a towel over his face and his head in his hands. One seat down, Reggie Bullock sat inside a locker, his face grim. Playing in that kind of defeat and having to reconcile your contributions is difficult. Being unable to play in that kind of defeat, with no contribution to the 40 minutes on the court, is agonizing.
A little over three weeks ago, Roy Williams walked into the Smith Center locker room, where his team was gathered awaiting his arrival. They had a practice to prepare for and a game the next day. No one expected what he said next.
"The coaches and I were talking," he told his team. "We just wanted to tell you how lucky we feel to coach this group."
Tyler Zeller had that comment on his mind on Sunday night, sitting with his jersey still on, two bright red cuts running up his left forearm.
"Coming from Coach, that kind of thing means so much," Zeller said. "To say I was part of a team that he felt that way about, that's something I'll remember forever. And it's the same way for me. I love each and every one of these guys."
As he said it, he looked around the room, where the media had cleared out, leaving just his teammates. Blank faces abounded, the faces of shock and loss. For weeks, Williams had been telling them about the "swiftness and suddenness" with which a season could end. Now they were feeling it.
That's a feeling you never want but you must have. What we loved about this team was the unselfish way they played Carolina Basketball the way we most fondly remembered it. Now, they had another link to that history. James Worthy felt this way in 1981. Eric Montross in 1991. Sean May in 2004. Tyler Hansbrough in 2008. At that exact moment, it felt like it would never go away. Soon enough, it was washed away by confetti.
The challenge is to forget that feeling while never forgetting that feeling. Just before the Tar Heels ran out of the locker room in the 2009 Final Four, Bobby Frasor said just a few words: "Remember what it felt like last year."
At some point, Marshall is going to say those words. Tonight, losing to Kentucky feels miserable. Soon--not within days, but within months or years--it'll be an essential experience. Think about his freshman season. Did he ever make the same mistake twice? Never, and that's why you want him leading the program into the fall of 2011.
For years, I've believed the worst feeling imaginable in this job is the scene in a Carolina locker room at the end of a season. There is frustration and tears and anger. In other words, it looks a lot like the scene in your living room.
What I like best about these last 365 days is that they showed us there is something even worse than that misery: the scene in a Carolina locker room at the end of a season...with no tears. That was the picture in the 2010 locker room, as Carolina fell to Dayton in the NIT championship in a game that carried exactly no significance and no red eyes. If you spend virtually every waking minute of six months doing something and it's not enough to make you cry, really, was it worth doing?
On the way back from the team meal on Saturday night in Newark, a group of Tar Heels started freestyle rapping on the bus.
"It really made me think," Zeller said. "Last year on the bus, everyone had their headphones on. And there we were Saturday, and everyone was making beats. I couldn't do it, because I have no rhythm, but everybody else was doing it. And we were all laughing, and that's how it always is with this team. We're serious when we have to be, and as soon as practice is over, we're having fun. You just don't find that with a whole team."
So the answer to Coach Haase's question is no, that there's never been a Carolina team like this. The coaches saw it and the players saw it and somehow, through your TV or from your seat at the Smith Center, you saw it, too.
"We fought through adversity," Marshall said. "We had a bunch of kids that might not have had the best talent, but every night, in every game, we felt like we were the best team."
The bus was about to load and tomorrow was creeping closer, a day with no practice. Walking out the door meant admitting the season was over. Stay in here, and maybe it wasn't real. So you walk up to Strickland, who had red blood streaked up the right shoulder of his jersey. You pat him on the shoulder without the blood and mumble something about his effort.
"I tried so hard, man," he said. "All these guys did."
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.
