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University of North Carolina Athletics
Lucas: Getaway Day
November 16, 2016 | Men's Basketball, Featured Writers, Adam Lucas
By Adam Lucas
Carolina leaves for Maui on Wednesday afternoon, and maybe it showed a little on Tuesday evening.
It's a mark of how impressive the Tar Heels have been early in the season that we can quibble with a 26-point win over Long Beach State, the preseason favorite in their league and a well-coached team with some talent on the roster. Only 26 points? What happened?
“The first ten minutes of the second half, other than Isaiah's dunk on the fast break on the lob, it was about as bad offensively as I've seen us in 31 practices,” Roy Williams said.
Let's see—the first ten minutes of the second half made up 25 percent of the game, and the head coach said his team was atrocious in that stretch.
They still scored 93 points. In a game in which they held the opponent scoreless for the first seven minutes and 30 seconds of action.
So everyone's problems are relative. After the win, Tony Bradley talked about Wednesday's long trip to Honolulu and his…well…fear isn't quite the right word, but maybe “trepidation” would be the right choice, about the flight.
“It's a long flight,” the rookie said. “Being in the air for that long…I'm not a fan of that. That length of time, a ten-hour flight.”
Everything's relative, right, Tony? Sure, ten hours on the plane won't be pleasant, especially for those members of the traveling party who stand 6-foot-11. But it's sort of like being horrible offensively for a quarter of the game and still scoring 93 points—once you survive the 10-hour flight, you're in Hawaii for seven days. There are worse outcomes.
Over the course of Tuesday night, it felt like some minds had perhaps already drifted to the islands. The Tar Heel bus didn't quite have the engines running in the parking lot, but it felt very much like a getaway day game. During one stretch in the second half, after Williams had already had to exhort Hicks to “DO something!” on offense, the coach watched his three freshmen putter around aimlessly for two straight possessions during one of their rotations together.
He called timeout, refocused everyone, and they promptly came back out and crisply broke down the 49er defense on the way to a Brandon Robinson three-pointer. Sometimes you just need a little reminder.
Hey, you try having someone tell you that tomorrow you're going on a weeklong jaunt to Hawaii, but on the night before you shouldn't think about it at all and instead completely focus on an entirely different basketball team.
Even the crowd perhaps also had already started thinking about Hawaii, which could be excused, because they know exactly how telling trips to the islands have been under Williams. In 2004, the Tar Heels had an eye-opening blitz of BYU in the Maui opener, then rolled to the title with a pair of double-digit wins over Tennessee and Iowa, providing the first sign of an eventual national title team. Four years later, Carolina unleashed a previously injured Tyler Hansbrough on Notre Dame in the championship game and waxed the eighth-ranked Irish by 15. And in a less happy memory, on the last trip, in 2012, Butler pushed around a Carolina team that finished 25-11.
What's the story of this year's visit? We'll find out over the next week, with a field that suddenly includes some squads who will be angry for some retribution; Oregon was throttled by Baylor on Tuesday, and Wisconsin lost to (ugh) Creighton, meaning the other two top-10 teams in the field will arrive in Maui having already dropped a game.
Georgetown has a loss and UConn has a pair; there will be other teams arriving in Maui in the same situation that Carolina was in during that 2004 visit. On that trip, the Tar Heels arrived after a loss to Santa Clara and Roy Williams told his team to enjoy the scenery on the way to the practice gym, because that's where they would be spending most of their time.
With Theo Pinson already out (foot) and Luke Maye looking doubtful (ankle, Roy Williams said he was unlikely to play in Maui and put the possible timeframe at “two or three weeks” until his return), the Tar Heels will have to do some lineup juggling with the upcoming four games in six days. They'll get a long flight, a little culture, and—most importantly—the best competition of the 2016-17 season so far.
“I think that is what this team wants,” said Joel Berry. “We want a good challenge.”
It's coming...right after that flight.
