University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Career High
December 19, 2015 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
BROOKLYN—Of course Brice Johnson scored his career high in that game. Of course he did.
Career highs are supposed to be those ones you remember forever, the ones where everything happens just perfectly in exactly the way it has to happen for you to have a better performance than you've ever had before.
So it was for Johnson on Saturday afternoon at the Barclays Center against UCLA, where the breakdown of his afternoon looked a little like this:
Three minutes playing listlessly at the start of the game, missing his first field goal attempt.
Ten seconds getting blistered by Roy Williams after Johnson expressed his displeasure with his early performance a little too vigorously for Williams' taste while the senior was returning to the bench.
One minute sitting on the far end of the Carolina bench, where the head coach banished him.
Seven more minutes sitting on the bench watching the Tar Heels struggle to an early deficit. “I was worried if I was going to get back in there,” Johnson said. “(Coach) looked past me about four times in the rotation.”
Twenty-six minutes of absolutely dominant basketball, including 11-for-11 shooting from the field, a career-high 27 points, a block, an assist and eight rebounds all in only those 26 minutes. He finished with 27 points and nine rebounds in 29 minutes.
“You know you're ridiculous, right?” manager Forrest Reynolds asked Johnson when the big man came out of the game for the last time, after the Tar Heels were well on their way to an 89-76 victory that they turned into a blowout after leading by just three points with just 10:35 to go in the game.
That's exactly what he is. He's ridiculous. Early in the game, he looked completely disinterested. His body language was not positive, his effort was not great, and the head coach was seconds away from sending him to the locker room. Then, less than the amount of time it would take you to walk across Times Square later, he was the most dominant force in a game that attracted three dozen NBA scouts.
He scored in the paint. He scored outside the paint. He used post moves. He used athleticism. He swooped under the rim and around to score on the other side.
As Kennedy Meeks accurately described after Johnson converted another basket over UCLA's Tony Parker, “He's eating his lunch!”
Has there ever been another Tar Heel exactly like Johnson? Rasheed Wallace is the only other player who comes to mind in the recent past who was so fueled by emotion.
It's been remarkable to watch Johnson…well, is mature the right word? It must be. Because earlier in his career, after being admonished the way he was in the first half, he would have disappeared for the rest of the day. This time, he went to the bench, admitted his mistake—“I've go to stop doing stuff like that,” he said after the game—and came back and helped his team win the game. What is it Dean Smith said you do with a mistake? Recognize it, admit it, learn from it, and forget it. Johnson is the living embodiment of that philosophy. He's made plenty of mistakes. But he's starting to figure out the other three components, too.
He may have been on the receiving end of more Williams exasperated looks than any player in the last dozen years, because he's been getting them for a full four years.
But as frustrated as they get with each other, as much as you wonder if Johnson is getting ready to run to the locker room and just keep going or whether Williams might leave him somewhere in Brooklyn, their relationship works. Williams has figured out Johnson responds to that type of coaching; Johnson's dad coached him for many years and prepared him for that type of tough love. And Johnson has figured out that Williams is trying to make him better, and might ream him one second and exhort him the next.
Let's be clear: this wasn't completely the Brice Johnson Show. Joel Berry II was terrific and Theo Pinson and Luke Maye made multiple hustle plays that keyed the UNC surge.
But they almost always led to Johnson, like Pinson's block that turned into a Marcus Paige assist to Johnson for a big first-half dunk, or Maye's offensive rebound that created a couple of Johnson free throws.
Johnson did some of the work with his activity level, which was much higher in the second half. He drew Parker's fourth foul by posting up in what was still a one-possession game early in the second half, and Parker's absence (he had 13 points and 11 rebounds and was a first-half force) hurt the Bruins.
Johnson's afternoon ended, of course, with a nationally televised interview on CBS. He had to lean in to hear CBS reporter Allie LaForce, because the crowd was yelling so loud he couldn't hear her questions.
“Brice…Brice…Brice!” they chanted.
Johnson finished the interview, slapped hands with a little girl in a Tar Heel jersey, and sprinted off the court, back to the locker room to which he'd almost been banished a couple of hours earlier.
Just another career high. Of course it was.
