University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Getting Involved
January 5, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
TALLAHASSEE—Marcus Paige is the acknowledged and designated intermediary for everything the Carolina players might need from Roy Williams.
Need a lighter day of practice? Get Marcus to ask Coach.
Think a certain set might work? Get Marcus to ask Coach.
Want to change up the pregame meal routine? Get Marcus to ask Coach.
He might not always get his way, but if you want something done, and you want to have the best possible odds of success, you get Marcus to ask Coach.
With that understanding, here is the kind of night Brice Johnson had on Monday night at the Donald Tucker Center.
When the Tar Heels retreated to their locker room after your average 106-90—in regulation!—win at Florida State, no one wanted to get in the shower. That's because the trip itinerary called for coats and ties on the way home. But, well, this had been a big road win, and Carolina was 3-0 in the ACC for the first time since 2008, so maybe, just maybe, Williams would relax the dress code just a little. Players and coaches have separate locker rooms virtually everywhere in the ACC, and this was one of those cases. Williams was not in the room.
"Hold on,” Paige said as he took his seat in the cramped locker room. You have seen this before. Paige would have to leave, and go talk to Williams, and maybe persuade him to allow sweats on the team charter.
“No way,” Paige said. “Brice, it's got to be you. There's no way anyone can ask him other than you tonight.”
That's how we're going to remember this night. Johnson scored 39 points and had 23 rebounds and made 14 of his 16 field goal attempts and all of that is amazing and singular and we have almost an entire week to argue about where it falls in Tar Heel basketball history.
But I have seen great scoring performances before. I have seen great rebounding performances before. Sometimes, I have even seen them together.
But I have never, ever seen a night when Brice Johnson was the player called upon to ask a favor from Roy Williams, and I don't believe I will ever see it again.
The verdict: of course the players wore sweats. You kind of got the impression if Johnson had asked to sit in Wanda's seat on the way home, Williams' wife might have had to move back a row.
You know you have done something incredible when even your peers sit around and talk about it. That's what happened in the Carolina locker room when Johnson left. He walked down the hall to find Williams, and his teammates proceeded to pass around a box score and marvel at what an incredible game he'd just played.
“That's the greatest performance I've ever seen,” Kennedy Meeks said.
Theo Pinson shook his head. “He almost got 40! Look at the rebounds!”
Paige just laughed. “How do you get 39 and not figure out a way to get to 40? You've got to get it there somehow.” This is where we are in the world—a Tar Heel turned in a scoring performance to which even Paige can't relate.
“This dude right here put up 30!” Meeks said, pointing to Paige. The locker room nodded in agreement. “Thirty!”
Paige grinned. He is used to this.
But Meeks wasn't done. “And no one cares about it at all!” he roared, and the locker room dissolved in laughter, because it was true, and because it was so absurd that two Tar Heels had just scored at least 30 points for the first time since Antawn Jamison and Shammond Williams did it in 1998 at Georgia Tech—and that was in a two-overtime contest.
Before he scored the 39 points, before he got the 23 rebounds, Johnson did a pregame acupuncture treatment with Jonas Sahratian before the game. “It kind of hurt,” Johnson said. “Not sure I'm going to do it again.”
Brice.
Brice, Brice, Brice.
You are going to do the pregame acupuncture treatment. I am going to do the pregame acupuncture treatment. Rhonda in Mebane is going to do the pregame acupuncture treatment. If you keep getting 39 and 23, Sahratian is going to open Pregame Acupuncture, Inc. and the lines are going to be out the door.
Does the phrase “go where you go and do what you do” mean nothing to you, Brice? It's pretty simple, big guy. You do pregame acupuncture=you go off for 39 and 23. Do you think we're all wearing these lucky sweaters and eating the same thing because we like doing it? No, it's because we know how to do our part. You do pregame acupuncture.
Oh, and you get 39 and 23.
I wish you all could sit right beside the Carolina bench for just one game. Well, hold on. It needs to be an Atlantic Coast Conference game, and preferably a road game. Because in those games—when the Tar Heels leave Chapel Hill and hit the road and the crowd gets worked up and there is yelling and screaming and an incredible amount of noise—Roy Williams is at his very best. On Monday night, he was changing defenses and calling plays and he was coaching, boy. He was coaching.
Joel Berry II picked up his fourth foul with approximately 11 minutes left. Williams immediately substituted for him, and when Berry came to the bench, the sophomore was noticeably disappointed.
“Get your head up!” Williams barked. “Let's go!”
On the court, the Seminoles had closed to within just two points, but Williams knew his team still needed Berry, and he made sure to keep him emotionally in the game. It worked—Berry scored seven of his 12 points in the final 5:46 and also recorded an assist.
Two minutes after Berry picked up his fourth, Pinson was also saddled with four. Williams stood up.
“Theo!” he yelled. Pinson looked over. “Can you play smart?” his head coach asked him.
Pinson replied that he could. And he almost immediately picked up an assist—to Johnson, of course, because six of Carolina's 12 second-half assists were to Johnson (Brice himself recorded one of the others)—and never did commit that fifth foul.
With 2:30 left, Williams turned to his bench, face reddening, and clinched his fists and screamed, “COME ON!”
His team was currently holding a 97-85 lead. That's the kind of game it was.
About a minute later, as the lead remained in double digits, Williams found a familiar target.
“Brice!” he yelled. “Get involved!”
At that exact point in the game, Johnson had 37 points and 22 rebounds. He was, you might fairly say, pretty involved. With only a slightly quizzical look, Johnson proceeded to get another dunk, another rebound, and a steal in the final 90 seconds of the win.
Johnson very nearly giggled as he tried to describe his performance. “It's an honor,” he said of the names he'll soon share space with—Cunningham, Rosenbluth, Jamison, May, among others—in the Tar Heel record book. Don't look now, but we're rapidly moving past “Brice Johnson is on a hot streak” to “Maybe this is Brice Johnson.”
“I've never scored that many points before,” Johnson said with a slightly disbelieving grin.
And that's why you just have to love him. In an era of college basketball when everyone is cool and everyone has seen it all before, even Johnson had to admit he had never, ever seen anything like this.
After Paige dispatched Johnson to ask Williams about the postgame dress code, Paige shook his head.
“I give Brice a hard time sometimes,” he said. “But I'm not saying anything to him tonight.”
