University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Going In
December 13, 2015 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
AUSTIN—That's going in.
That was the first thought that flashed through your mind when Javan Felix released a 16-footer with 0.1 seconds remaining in an 82-82 game on Saturday afternoon. The shot seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, so there was time to suffer.
He's going to make that, and the 16,540 fans are going to go crazy, and the Texas players are going to parade around the court popping their jerseys, and the Tar Heels are going to be ushered off the floor around a raucous celebration.
From the Tar Heel Sports Network location directly beside the Carolina bench, we had a perfect view of it. We saw Isaiah Taylor miss a three-pointer, and we saw Felix standing completely alone on the right-hand side of the court, and we saw Marcus Paige go sprawling out of bounds after a hockey check, and we saw Felix—Paige's man—collect the offensive rebound, and we saw the form on the shot and the ball in the air and, well, it was going in.
“He had been hot all game,” Paige said of Felix, who finished with a game-high 25 points. “It was basically a practice shot for him.”
The first shot, Taylor's shot, felt rushed. That one didn't feel like it was going in. Grab the rebound, hold on to the ball, make it to overtime, and maybe something different happens. But as soon as the ball caromed to Felix, it felt a little too familiar, and that's one of the most dangerous things facing Carolina right now.
They spent the entire summer talking about the need to put away opponents when holding a second-half lead. But the Tar Heels had a four-point lead with under six minutes to play and still took the loss, the second defeat in the first month of the season after holding a second-half lead.
“We have to finish,” said Joel Berry II, who had eight points and a couple of steals.
Yes. It happened against Maryland, as Carolina held off a good opponent to get the win. But it needs to happen on the road, the way you've seen it happen so many times before with Tar Heel basketball. It's easy to get a little smug because you've had a lifetime as a Carolina fan, so you know the routine:
Opponent brings in boisterous crowd bigger than any they've had all year (the Frank Erwin Center crowd took some shots in the local paper after barely 3,000 fans attended this week's game against USTA; they put over 16,000 people in the building on Saturday, and they were vocal in their efforts to drown out the thunderous PA system).
Here's what is supposed to happen: the Tar Heels take that opponent's best shot, get the crowd to the point where they're standing for every crucial possession, then punch them in the gut and sneak off into the night with their brownies and a win.
That's a Carolina basketball trademark. And it needs to happen regularly again soon, or there's fear of losing the copyright.
Now, here's the thing: it's tougher than you think to play on the road, especially in December. The Tar Heels took exams all week. They had skeleton practices due to the combination of school demands and an illness that ripped through the team. Theo Pinson, for example, did not practice Thursday or Friday, and he looked wobbly on Saturday, playing a season-low ten minutes while scoring zero points and never really appearing into the flow of the game.
“It's been really different,” Berry said of practice this week with minimal healthy bodies. “That's not an excuse at all, because we still have to play basketball. But it's been really different.”
Even under the best of circumstances, playing on the road is difficult. The Tar Heels spent less than 24 hours in the Lone Star state. Six of those hours were devoted to air travel and making the nearly 2,500-mile roundtrip. Carolina arrived at the team hotel on Friday night around 11 p.m. Central time and still had a meeting on the itinerary. There was a late night on Friday and then a shootaround Saturday at an unfamiliar gym, and then a hostile crowd that had arrived for the express purpose of watching the Tar Heels.
Think about how you feel after a long flight. Now imagine going out and playing a basketball game virtually right away. Sure, they're kids and they're resilient and they get charter airplanes and nice hotels, but they're also still standing out on the tarmac unloading a basketball team's worth of bags at midnight twice inside of 24 hours.
So here's the question: all of that sounds like a giant pain. So why not stay at home and play there? Because Roy Williams is trying to teach his team something, how to “handle a crowd, hold your poise and shut the crowd up,” as he said on Saturday's pregame radio show. That's what December is supposed to be for, and if you look at his history at Carolina, there are multiple examples of squads learning that the hard way.
This one needs to improve in that area. They clawed out the win against Kansas State in a virtual road environment, but there need to be more of those types of wins. There need to be some of those prototypical Carolina wins that leave the home crowd wondering what in the world just happened.
Paige didn't play at Northern Iowa. A sizable portion of the roster was unhealthy the week of Texas, and it was the week of exams, when strange things seem to happen to Carolina basketball. The losses aren't definitive indicators of a fatal problem.
But still, there was that feeling: it's going in. That's different than the typical feeling late in a close Tar Heel basketball game, when you usually have a sense that somehow, some way, they're about to pull this one out. You go where you go, and they do what they do, which is make winning plays. Saturday, they made some. Texas made more.
Before the celebration began, the officials reviewed the replay directly next to us. We were sitting right there as referee Michael Stephens asked the replay technician to run it back, and then run it forward, and then blow up the screen so he could see the ball in Felix's hand in conjunction with the clock above the backboard. There was less discussion than you might imagine in that situation. Just the replay, over and over.
They watched it, and then they watched it again, and then they watched it again. They only watched the release. They never bothered to watch the conclusion of the play. They didn't have to. It was going in.
