University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: About The Shot
February 9, 2012 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Feb. 9, 2012
By Adam Lucas
It was not about the shot.
You're going to see Austin Rivers's game-winning three-pointer a dozen times on Thursday, and every time it's going to infuriate you. The highlights will show that his buzzer-beater is how Carolina lost the game.
It was not how Carolina lost the game.
Up ten points with under 2:30 to play, it takes an unbelievable series of events to create a comeback. Like, for example, a pair of three-pointers off an offensive rebound and an uncharacteristic turnover, another offensive rebound that led to two more points, a Tar Heel tipping the ball into the Duke basket, and a last-second mismatch that leads to some uncertainty.
All of that had to happen. If any one of those five things doesn't happen--over a 150-second span in which the Tar Heels did not attempt a single field goal--this is a very different story.
But they all happened. All five of them. You could feel it starting to unravel a little after the second three-pointer. What happened?
"We just mentally fell apart," said Harrison Barnes.
Out of all the Carolina postgame locker rooms I've been in, over all the seasons and all the years, I don't remember any like this. There was no music, of course, because that's for wins. But there was also no talking. There was no sound of tape being cut off ankles. No shoes being slammed to the floor.
There was nothing. It was absolutely silent. Players met the media with their game jerseys still on, towels slung around their shoulders.
An obviously despondent Tyler Zeller was the last player to emerge. Understand this: to get anywhere close to blaming the loss on him is foolhardy. If Zeller hadn't shown up in the first half, Duke might well have taken a double-digit lead into the locker room and coasted through the second half. He had 23 points and 11 rebounds and was a couple of made free throws away from this story being about his epic Carolina-Duke performance.
But he didn't make them. Which meant he had to sit in front of the media, and had to somehow quantify what it must be like to shoot a free throw with 21,750 people watching, with their mother standing nervously in the first row near midcourt with her hands clenched tightly together, and then have to walk off the court feeling like you lost the game. He will blame himself much harder than any of us--hopefully--would ever blame him.
He will see those final 15 seconds before he goes to sleep, in his sleep, and the first thing when he wakes up. It is not easy for a big man to stay with a guard in that situation. Tyler Hansbrough did it against Florida State's Toney Douglas in Tallahassee in 2009. The reason we remember it is because it's such a unique play.
Teams practice almost everything. It's very hard to simulate your seven-footer having to go one-on-one against the other team's best scorer. In that moment, when there was no luxury of thinking--imagine if thousands of people talked for hours or days or weeks or maybe years about a decision you made in less than 10 seconds--Zeller made a choice he almost instantly regretted.
"I should have gotten up further," he said. "I didn't want to foul him. But you can't give him the three when you're up two."
He's right, of course. But it was not about the shot. It was about those two minutes before the shot, when Duke essentially did the exact opposite to Carolina of what the Tar Heels did to them in 2005, when Marvin Williams's three-point play capped a nine-point comeback in three minutes. Remember the euphoria of that shot, how you still get a little giddy when you see the replay? This was the exact inverse of that moment. This was a bottomless feeling as soon as the buzzer went off.
And in that way, it is about the shot. Not the game--the game was about those final two minutes. But that feeling of dread that settled over the Smith Center as Duke piled on each other near center court was not because of just losing the game. It was not about having to watch the celebration.
It's about the knowledge that we'll be watching that shot forever. It instantly goes right onto the essential Carolina-Duke highlight reel, with Walter Davis in 1974 and bloody Montross and Chris Duhon's layup and bloody Hansbrough and Danny Green over Greg Paulus and Jeff Capel's halfcourt heave. It is right there, already. You'll never be able to see any of those without also seeing Austin Rivers drop through a three-pointer.
That's why fans stayed frozen to their seats. It was sheer paralysis, the kind that comes when you know that what you just saw was instantaneously seared into your brain. There are very few moments like that. This was one. It instantly goes to the top of the most gut-wrenching regular season losses (NCAA Tournament losses are in an entirely different category) in Carolina history.
Roy Williams has now coached 311 games at North Carolina. I can only think of one regular season game when he has appeared as frustrated and downtrodden as he did on Wednesday night--that was in 2004, when Duhon drove the length of the floor to beat Carolina in overtime. From an outside perspective, that game didn't hurt as much as this one. In 2004, most of us were just thrilled to be relevant again. Just having an opportunity to win that type of game was enough to cause giddiness.
Eight years and two championships later, the expectations feel a little different. We're spoiled again, which is terrific. And the head coach, the one who was so jarringly disappointed in 2004?
He trudged through the locker room while his players did interviews. His jacket was off and his head was down. He looked, well, he looked exactly the way you felt at around 11:30 on Wednesday night.
He'll take the evening to despair. Sleep will not come easily.
But for him, tomorrow will not be about the shot. The shot is simply the tool that caused the fourth loss of the season. He doesn't have time or the inclination to worry about things like Carolina-Duke series highlight reels or where that comeback might rank in the history of the two teams or what it means about the rivalry.
At the end of his late night press conference, he started to provide a tiny window into what these next couple days might be like. How in the world do you come back from that? We're all going to wake up in the morning and it's going to be one of the first things we think about and the worst part is that it's going to be real.
You know how you feel. Imagine how they feel.
"You ought to be ticked off," he said. "You ought to be flat out ticked off. You're going to become more determined. If you start wallowing in sorrow for yourself or feeling sorry for yourself, you should just go home...We lost a game we could've won. If we don't learn something from that and come back more determined, I've got the wrong group. And I don't think I have the wrong group. We're going to come back and go to work."
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 and Facebook.
