University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: How 0-3 Happened
January 15, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
Let's just get this out of the way right now: Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison and Ed Cota are not on this year's Carolina team. Neither, for that matter, are Ademola Okulaja, Serge Zwikker or Shammond Williams.
Those may be some popular names around Chapel Hill this week, because that group formed the core of the 1997 Tar Heels--otherwise known as the only other team in program history to start 0-3 in the ACC.
This is not a story intended to tell you that if that group could do it, so can this group. In fact, this story has nothing at all to do with this year's team. Instead, the question is this: how in the world did a team that included Jamison, Carter, Cota, Okulaja, Zwikker and Williams--and coached by Dean Smith and also including current director of operations Brad Frederick--start 0-3 in the ACC?
First, you have to put away what we've learned about that group in the years since 1997. Jamison was essentially unstoppable from the moment he arrived on campus and made first-team All-ACC all three seasons, but Carter wasn't half-man, half-amazing from the beginning.
Instead, he was more half-amazing, half-perplexing. He was sometimes outplayed by the more polished Okulaja as a freshman, and was still figuring out when and where to use his superior athleticism within the boundaries of the other four players on the court.
Williams would eventually become one of the best three-point shooters to ever play at Carolina. But in 1997, he was still sometimes playing slightly out of position at point guard and was being asked to transition from being a key reserve to running a very young Tar Heel offense.
Cota was a freshman and had the only season of his Carolina career with an assist/turnover ratio below 2:1. As you might have noticed lately, those first few conference games can occasionally be rough for rookies; Cota coughed up eight turnovers against Virginia and had three (with just one assist) against Wake Forest.
So they weren't yet the Carter/Cota/Jamison juggernaut that we think of steamrolling through the 1998 campaign (until encountering freaking Utah, which will forever be known as simply freaking Utah). They also had the misfortune of a challenging early ACC schedule.
The league opener sent the Tar Heels to second-ranked Wake Forest; as we have seen, ACC openers in Winston tend to go poorly. To make things even more difficult, Dean Smith had just taken his team to Europe-yes, in the middle of the season. After defeating Princeton on Dec. 22, Carolina left on Christmas Day for a weeklong trip that included stops in the Netherlands and Italy.
The trip was a "home" game for Serge Zwikker; as a nod to Vasco Evtimov, one of the games was against the Bulgarian national team. There are some video highlights here (the two-handed Carter block at 1:20 is ridiculous):
It sounds like a fantastic trip for team bonding, cultural enrichment and worldliness. As preparation for the ACC opener, though? Perhaps not the most intense way to get ready for the league.
There was at least a hint of fatigue in the first game after the trip. But another problem was the opponent, as Wake Forest was ranked second in the country and would go on to finish second in the league, just a game behind regular season champion Duke. The Deacs whipped the Tar Heels, 81-57.
The second loss of the league year was less explainable. For one of the very few times in the modern era, Carolina was the victim--instead of the perpetrator--of an incredible comeback. Maryland outscored UNC 41-9 over the final 14:23 at the Smith Center, including a 28-2 run, to grab an 85-75 win. The Tar Heels played without Carter, who missed the game with a hip pointer, and his absence highlighted the squad's lack of depth (for another example, see the fact that Webb Tyndall and Charlie McNairy played a combined nine minutes in the next outing).
Carolina had the misfortune to travel to Virginia in the next game, a place where the Cavaliers tormented the Tar Heels in essentially every sport in the late-1990s. The 1997 game came in the midst of a stretch when the Cavaliers won six out of nine games at University Hall despite being ranked in only three of those meetings.
UNC shot 28 percent in the first half of this particular game, on the way to falling behind 35-20 at halftime. Norman Nolan--for one night--was the equal of Jamison, finishing with 20 points and 11 rebounds. Virginia point guard Harold Deane had six assists and earned the line of the night from Smith.
"I've seen Deane here a few years," the Tar Heel head coach said. "I think he's as old as I am."
In other words, it wasn't any one thing that doomed Carolina to the 0-3 league start. And even after that club rebounded to make the Final Four, Smith bristled at the notion that he simply waved a wand and made them a solid team. He frequently pointed out the Tar Heels had needed a frantic comeback to beat NC State and avoid 0-4, and then finished the first half of league play with a meager 3-5 conference record.
It was something Smith had said after the Maryland loss that provided the best insight into the turnaround. Remember, this was after a seemingly catastrophic meltdown the likes of which had never been seen before at the Smith Center. "I think we'll come along," he said. "It's not going to be easy with this group. They are young but we're certainly not going to start talking about next year on January 8. There is a lot of time left."
Adam Lucas is the editor of CAROLINA.
