University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Tar Heel Basketball Notebook
February 7, 2014 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
After using a variety of starting lineups through the first half of the season, Roy Williams inserted Leslie McDonald and Kennedy Meeks as starters on Jan. 26 against Clemson. They've played well enough to maintain that starting spot since then, and it's corresponded with a four-game winning streak.
"I like the fact that it gives us a little more scoring punch," Williams said. "Kennedy has been our best true low-post scorer. Leslie gives us another shooter on the perimeter."
But it's also true that a spot in the starting lineup doesn't guarantee playing time. For two straight games, Brice Johnson has played more minutes than Meeks, including Tuesday night against Maryland, when Johnson was on an 8-for-8 roll from the field.
"The other guys are still playing a lot," Williams said. "We're still playing several people. Kennedy started the other night, but in the second half I went with Brice."
Meeks has played just 13 second-half minutes combined in the last two games. The player who gets the call in Saturday's second half at Notre Dame is likely to be the one who does a better job defensively on Irish leading scorer Garrick Sherman, a 6-foot-11 senior who is averaging 14.5 points and 8.0 rebounds per game.
Here come the Irish: The two games between Carolina and Notre Dame over the next month represent more meetings than the two programs have had against each other in nearly 20 years. The most recent battle was a top-10 showdown in Maui in November of 2008, when Tyler Hansbrough took personally some suggestions that Luke Harangody might be his equal and helped lead the Tar Heels to a 102-87 throttling of the Irish.
The most memorable sequence in the series came from 1977 through 1987, when the teams had five meetings, with three of the five decided by only one basket. The first came in the 1977 NCAA Tournament, as Phil Ford capped a 29-point performance with two free throws with two seconds left to eliminate the tenth-ranked Irish on St. Patrick's Day.
Then, in 1985, Notre Dame held the ball for over a minute to get the last shot in a 58-58 second-round NCAA Tournament game. But the ball was slapped away from David Rivers, and Curtis Hunter found Kenny Smith for a buzzer-beating layup that advanced the Tar Heels to the regional semifinals. The second-seeded Tar Heels played on the home court of the seventh-seeded Irish. The game-winning play can be seen at the 5:00 mark in this video, but there's some tremendous Carolina ball movement if you watch the whole thing:
In 1986, Carolina captured a relatively nondescript 73-61 win over 16th ranked Notre Dame, but in 1987, Rivers (who played at Notre Dame for approximately 12 seasons) helped engineer a 60-58 upset of the top-ranked Tar Heels in South Bend. Carolina got revenge a month later, as they defeated the Irish, 74-68, in the NCAA Tournament. J.R. Reid had 31 points and Smith dealt 12 assists.
Defining sense of urgency: Interesting comments from Williams defining the much-discussed "sense of urgency." "Sense of urgency is not just diving on the floor," he said. "It's everything. It's being into it mentally. For those two hours, nothing else is as important as what's going on on the court...It's not just playing hard. Sense of urgency includes the intellectual part of it, too."
Adam Lucas is the editor of CAROLINA.
