University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: UNC Basketball Notebook
December 30, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
One of the primary benefits of Carolina's pre-conference schedule is the variety of styles the Tar Heels have faced. They've seen up-tempo squads like Florida that want to generate pace with defense, they've seen slower paced squads like Butler that grind through every possession, and they've seen a healthy dose of zone, the current book on how to beat Carolina.
They'll see another approach tonight when the three-point barrage of William and Mary comes to Chapel Hill for a 7 p.m. tipoff. The Tribe gets almost 35 percent of its points from three-pointers, in the top 50 in the country, and their ratio of three-pointers attempted to field goals attempted ranks in the top 30 in America (Carolina, for comparison, ranks 344th in that category).
“They shoot 40 percent from the three-point line,” Roy Williams said on his radio show with Jones Angell on Monday night. “We don't have any individuals who shoot 40 percent from the three-point line. It's a little bit of that back door, spread you out, Princeton style. They have a lot of shooters. It's going to be a challenge, and our big guys are going to have to get out on the court because they don't really have a big post presence.”
William & Mary is coached by Tony Shaver, a High Point native and Carolina alum with whom Williams has a long relationship.
Quick turnaround: As soon as the Tar Heels finish tonight's game, attention will turn to the Atlantic Coast Conference opener at Clemson on Saturday night. That game, originally listed at TBA on some schedules, will be played at 8:15 p.m. on ESPN.
The game at Littlejohn is part of a tough opening stretch of the schedule, as Carolina plays two games in three days (the back half of the Saturday-Monday turnaround is a home game against 12-1 Notre Dame) and then hosts Louisville next weekend before visiting NC State on Jan. 14.
The Saturday-Monday turnarounds are a fact of life in the expanded ACC, because the league's television contract created a new slot on Monday nights. The Tar Heels had three such regular season scenarios last year and finished 5-1, with a road loss at Virginia—a tough game no matter what the date—the only blemish.
Williams is philosophical about the schedule. “A lot of people have those kind of things,” he said. “I always want to make sure one of them is at home. It's on the schedule, so we have to play it.”
An added benefit, in theory, is preparation for the postseason. Teams get only one day of preparation for the second game of any NCAA Tournament weekend, so it's a good opportunity to get the players accustomed to that type of hopeful eventuality.
In the zone: With Carolina's well-documented perimeter shooting struggles, the consistent book on the Tar Heels has been to play zone defense against them. That's given them plenty of pre-ACC work against the zone, and although sometimes they've gotten a little three-point happy, at times they've looked very good against it, especially when utilizing Kennedy Meeks or Brice Johnson at the free throw line in the middle of the defense.
“I have been fairly pleased with our zone offense,” Williams said. “We need Kennedy and Brice to move more. With all the teams I've coached for 27 years, we've been pretty good offensively against the zone.”
The head coach also made an interesting point about the difference between opponents who play zone as a part of their basic defensive package as opposed to those who just try to utilize it against Carolina.
“Teams that play zone because another team struggles against it won't be as good as a team that has the zone as their bread and butter defensively,” Williams said.
The Tar Heels will face one of those bread and butter clubs on Jan. 26 when Syracuse visits the Smith Center.
