University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Sparty Crashers
December 5, 2013 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
EAST LANSING, Mich.--Roy Williams asked for this game. When we're telling this story ten years from now, can we make a pact not to forget that? The crazy head coach actually asked for this game. He told the ACC he was willing to go on the road a second year in a row in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge, and the league sent him off to top-ranked Michigan State.
Here is what he found: 14,797 people in the Breslin Center, and they were all there to celebrate one of the best weeks in the history of Spartan athletics.
The football team will play for the Rose Bowl on Saturday. The men's soccer team will play for the Final Four on Saturday. And the basketball team was here for a wound-healing coronation, the top-ranked team in the country ready to punish North Carolina for a decade of painful losses to the Tar Heels. Carolina was not just the visitor. Carolina was the appetizer. And they had asked for it.
In the minutes before tipoff, unnoticed by most of the din, Hubert Davis walked over near the Carolina bench. He doesn't just know basketball. He knows Carolina basketball. "If we play," he said quietly, "we're going to beat them."
He didn't mean "if we play" in the sense that the game might or might not be held. He meant "if we play" as in playing hard, playing smart, and playing together. He meant "if we play" Carolina basketball, that elusive brand that was absent on Sunday at UAB but has been known to make appearances, from time to time, when you least expect it. Davis, you might recall, threw the pass to Rick Fox for the gamewinner against top-ranked Oklahoma in 1990. That happens to be the last time an unranked Tar Heel team had beaten a top-ranked opponent.
That day, the Tar Heels played.
And this night? If we play? Oh, did they play.
In a game that improbably elbows aside Louisville as one of the best and most unlikely wins of the Roy Williams era, the Tar Heels went into East Lansing without two rotation players, without the player the head coach has consistently said has been unquestionably the best player on the team in practice, faced the nation's top-ranked team in an environment where they rarely lose, against an opponent that wanted vengeance and wanted decisive vengeance.
And what happened? The Tar Heels played...and then they beat them, 79-65.
We could talk about some individuals. We should talk about some individuals. We should talk about Nate Britt making seven of eight clutch free throws in the face of one of the best home court advantages in the country. We should talk about J.P. Tokoto's double-double, his 12 points and 10 rebounds in front of a dozen of his family and friends who made the trip from Wisconsin. We should talk about Kennedy Meeks owning the paint against a Michigan State program that has made a living under Tom Izzo out of owning the paint, and about Meeks throwing a seeing-eye crosscourt pass to Marcus Paige for the backbreaking three-pointer. We should talk about Brice Johnson's 14 points off the bench. We should talk about C.B. McGrath's precise scouting report on the Spartans.
You know who we should talk about? You're not going to guess this one. We should talk about James Michael McAdoo. The Tar Heel big man is struggling. He shot 3-for-11 against Michigan State. And yet, with four minutes left, it was McAdoo who threw himself on the floor to recover a loose ball after a Marcus Paige miss, saving the possession and eventually leading to a pair of Johnson free throws.
That's how Carolina plays basketball, and that's why we've been hooked on it for all of our lives, and that's why this particular game will hook another whole set of fans. Because it has never, ever been about an individual. There have been fantastic individuals, yes. But on the Carolina teams that have been the most fun to watch, those individuals haven't cared about anything but winning. And that's why McAdoo was on the floor on a 3-for-11 night, trying to give his team one more chance to score.
For three days, the Tar Heels had heard about a lack of effort against UAB. They watched film even after arriving in East Lansing on Tuesday night. "It was mind-blowing," Tokoto said of the clips Williams showed them Tuesday evening from the loss to the Blazers. "I never want to play that badly again. Seeing it on tape, you're like, 'Wow, I can't believe that's me.'"
The Tar Heels played a stellar first half and went into the locker room tied at 32. The tie felt like a major achievement. Except in Locker Room B, which housed the Tar Heels.
"Be more competitive," Williams told his team. "Work harder on offense and work harder on defense. Sprint back. Play together."
Imagine that. Carolina had just stunned the college basketball country by playing 20 competitive minutes against the best team in America, and Williams thought his team had more to give.
You can say they are inconsistent, and that's fine. But you also have to say they're good. And they're still young enough to be fun, to not be blasé about beating the top-ranked team in the country.
Tar Heel athletic director Bubba Cunningham was standing directly outside the UNC locker room 30 minutes after the win. Johnson walked out, wearing a suit. "Mr. Cunningham," he said, pumping the AD's hand as if he was running for mayor and was greeting a possible voter, "we just got the 'dub.'" It felt like the perfect summation of this team, which is simultaneously capable of playing 40 incredible minutes and of goofily congratulating the athletic director.
Does that seem like something a young kid would do? That's because they are. Of the eight players who played the most minutes in East Lansing, seven are freshmen and sophomores. And that's where the win holds the most value, where it bears the most resemblance to the 2006 Senior Day win against Duke. Even today, the freshmen on that '06 team cite that win at Cameron as the game that showed them what was possible for their careers and gave them a taste of winning big.
That was the night they finally understood what Roy Williams was talking about. That doesn't mean they were perfect after that night. But it means they understood why they wanted to be perfect, and how good it could feel. "The most fun moments you will ever have playing sports," the head coach often tells them, "are when your team does something great."
Ask Tyler Hansbrough or Danny Green or Bobby Frasor right now about the best regular season win of their career, and they will instantly reply, before you even finish your sentence, "Senior night at Duke." Wednesday night was that game for this group.
This game is one incredibly big win that we'll be talking about for years, about that night at Michigan State where Carolina beat the Spartans again. But this game is also one that will spawn so many other big wins, and two or three years from now, Meeks or Hicks will look back and say that's where the whole thing started, and that's when they started to understand the possibilities.
"We see," Britt said, "what our team is capable of."
"We all played together," said Meeks. "And we all get to be proud of the outcome."
"No one cared about individual stats," said Marcus Paige. "We were just happy for everyone. Everyone was happy with the way we came together tonight. It's cool to see that side of it."
It is incredibly cool. It is cool to watch Hicks, a Greensboro native, pull on his hooded sweatshirt with the interlocking "NC" on the front, looking every bit like the teenager he is, smiling just because he doesn't know what else to do.
On the court, he had been mature beyond his years. "This is going to be a man's game," Williams had told the team, and Hicks was as close to that as he's physically capable of being right now. When Carolina took an 18-6 first-half lead, it was Hicks--the second-youngest player on the team, who was born over a year after Carolina cut down the nets in New Orleans in 1993--who shouted at his teammates, "Don't look at the score. Just play."
It seemed like an awfully mature thing to say. You have heard it before, because Roy Williams says it almost every day. You tell Hicks that it sounds like something a head coach would say. Hicks has been very seriously listening to you, because he is a Carolina basketball player now and this is an interview and he wants to do this the right way and it seems like he should be solemn. But when you point out the similarities, his eyes widen and his face radiates, and the charade is over.
"Coach says that all the time. All. The Time," he says. "That's where I got it. That's why I'm here. This is why I came to Carolina, to have the chance to play in games like this."
Adam Lucas is the editor of CAROLINA.
