University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: An Acquired Taste
January 10, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
SYRACUSE—We are going to forget how big this one was, and that's great news.
There are going to be bigger wins this year. Carolina is going to beat teams that are closer to home, and beat ranked teams, and win games in March, and those are the ones you'll remember at the end of the season when you're thinking about your favorite moments.
Please do not forget this one, this chilly night in Syracuse (redundant) when Jim Boeheim returned and over 26,000 people crammed into the Carrier Dome and the Orange were desperate for a win and Trevor Cooney got hot.
All of those things happened. Did it come through on television, the momentum that Syracuse had in the second half? By the time Cooney hit a three-pointer to give the Orange a 56-50 lead with 8:50 remaining, it was one of the loudest arenas Carolina has played in during the Roy Williams era. Everyone was standing, even the fans with seats so far away they weren't completely sure if Boeheim was actually there or not. Cooney was waving his arms and orchestrating the noise.
This is what it's like to play road games in the Atlantic Coast Conference. These nights happen. An undefeated team goes on the road against a winless team, but the winless team is still coached by a Hall of Famer and still has quality talent. To the rest of the nation, maybe it looks like an upset, but the league knows. This is what road games mean in the ACC.
“I don't even call this a basketball gym,” said Joel Berry II. “I call it a football stadium. And when Cooney hit that shot, I mean it was really loud. I was like, 'Wow.'”
But here is something else: this is how you win road games in the ACC. Roy Williams didn't call timeout. Go ahead, admit it. You were screaming at the TV for him to call a darn timeout. Syracuse was about to blow this thing open and there he was on the sideline, not doing anything at all, so how were his players supposed to know what to do?
Maybe they practice. Because with the Carrier Dome rumbling on its foundation, Brice Johnson—he of the 39 points and 23 rebounds—did something that was a game-changing play. Maybe even season-changing. Mark this sequence and let's look back at it in March and see what happened the rest of the way. At a time when he could've been forgiven for being a little selfish, Johnson instead found Isaiah Hicks near the rim with a lightning-quick touch pass.
The Oxford native did the rest, unleashing a rim-rattling slam and drawing a foul from Tyler Roberson. When the two collided near the rim, it seemed Roberson had decided he was going to foul Hicks to keep him from getting an easy basket. It's just that Hicks had decided absolutely no one in the state of New York was going to deny his dunk.
“Brice told me to get ready,” Hicks said. “I have to give that one to Brice. He saw it was going to be open. And towards the end, the big men were all more aggressive inside. We started calling for the ball and putting a body against somebody.”
The play was transformative. Prior to the dunk, the Tar Heels had five turnovers in the last eight possessions and one field goal in the last eight minutes. After the dunk, the Tar Heels scored on eight straight possessions and 12 of the next 13 trips.
Johnson, suddenly a sage and also now a passer (eight assists!), said something that might be worth remembering.
“We've been there before,” he said. “We've been through it all, and this team has been together.”
And there we have it. There's an improved Hicks and a more complete Johnson and Berry of course making another big three-pointer, but what Brice Johnson said is what gives you the most hope looking towards the rest of what suddenly feels like a limitless season.
They've been here. And after struggling at Northern Iowa and Texas, they look like it. Because the Tar Heels stared down mean old Big East-native Syracuse, and they stood eye-to-eye with 26,000 angry people, and they arrived at the Carrier Dome on what will probably be the most emotional game Syracuse will play all year—0-3 in the league and desperate with Jim Boeheim coming back—and they earned it, they played it, and they won it.
“We want to be road warriors,” Johnson said. “We want to be able to go into anywhere and take everyone's brownies.”
“It's pretty nice,” Berry said, “when you can go into somewhere and make 26,000 people get quiet and start leaving the game early.”
Look out now. Teams have to develop a taste for that kind of winning. Some never do. The very best ones, though, always have it. I could name some Carolina teams that had it, but you already know the ones—the teams that relished the opportunity to go into the meanest, most hostile, most intense environments in the country. If this group really, truly cultivates that kind of winning attitude, then we're going to have a lot of fun over the next three months.
There's a difference between winning on the road and taking brownies. When you win on the road, you just beat them. When you take their brownies, you beat them...and then you crush their spirit. Not everybody can take brownies.
This was a brownie-taker.
You get there with attitude on the day of the game, but you also get there with a lot of hard work in the months before it's ever played. When he was spending all those offseason sessions working with Hubert Davis on his free throws, Hicks didn't know he'd have to make huge charity tosses with 26,811 people booing him. But it happened. Before every game, Hicks has a free throw shooting contest with Stilman White in which the duo compete to see who can make the most free throws out of ten. White is undefeated in these pregame shenanigans. But Hicks was big again at the stripe on Saturday night, where he made 11 of his 13 attempts.
Coming into the season, he was a 61.3 percent shooter at the line. He's over 80 percent for his junior season, because he wanted to be better, and because he listened to Davis. That's what enables you to step to the line in a tight game with the fans screaming and knock down shot after shot.
Every big road win needs a funny story. You want one from this game, something to ease the tension?
Senior do-everything academic wizard Marcus Paige very nearly took the court without a jersey. Yep. We were one heads-up manager away from a Thurman Thomas-type moment.
Paige always warms up with only his warm-up shirt on, then puts on his jersey when the team returns to the locker room. Only this time, he forgot. And so, when the Tar Heel starting lineup was announced, and he started to strip off his warm-up jersey, he realized he didn't have on the familiar blue argyle.
So there went manager Chase Bengel sprinting back to the Carolina locker room to retrieve a jersey, and there was Paige putting it on beside the Tar Heel bench with seconds until tip-off.
It's not quite Bobby Frasor falling over celebrating Wayne Ellington's game-winner at Clemson, but you can bet the next time the Tar Heels return to the locker room before the game, someone's going to remind Paige it would be a good idea to wear his jersey.
This is what it's like to win on the road. This is how it can be. This builds chemistry and this fosters winners. Pretty soon, you start believing that if you could win there, in front of all of those people, then why couldn't you do that same exact thing anywhere at any time, and that's when it becomes a very powerful weapon for a team.
At home, there's always the sense that you were supposed to win. On the road, everyone is against you. At home, they all love you. On the road, they all hate you…but if all goes well, they have to respect you.
The Carrier Dome is supported by a series of airlocks. They are very serious about these airlocks. You do not go through one series of doors until the other doors are closed, so you end up sharing space with everyone waiting on the next doors to open (You also end up feeling a little like an astronaut: "Captain Williams, we are go for launch, over.").
It just so happened that a group of Orange players and managers were walking out at the same time as a handful of Tar Heels after the game. “Is that a stat sheet?” one Syracuse manager asked a Carolina peer.
It was indeed a stat sheet, he was told.
“How many assists did Johnson have?” he asked.
Eight, he was told. His response was a colorful phrase.
“How many points did Hicks get?” he asked.
Twenty-one, he was told, and this time he shook his head.
“They're pretty good,” he said, a what-can-you-do kind of exasperation on his face.
On this night, they were better than good. This one, we may remember later this season, was the night they developed a taste for brownies.
