Lucas: The Last Dinner

By Adam Lucas

It took until the final official team event of his senior season, but we finally learned an example of Luke Maye doing something wrong.

It came at Wednesday night's Carolina basketball team banquet, and it was courtesy of Cameron Johnson. The freshly voted team most valuable player was turning in yet another terrific senior speech, a worthy companion to his terrific effort at the Smith Center on senior day. Johnson likewise did this one, in front of a much smaller crowd but with virtually all members of the program and player families present, without a single note.

"This is how I know Luke Maye has never been in trouble in his life," Johnson began. And then he proceeded to regale the crowd with a tale of Maye and Johnson waking up a couple minutes late for a team function during the postseason. An elevator that made multiple stops on the way to the team's meeting room meant they walked in approximately two minutes after the appointed time.

As Johnson relayed it, Maye's face was ashen.

"We'll be OK," Johnson said he reassured his roommate. "They know we're not the type to get into trouble." Johnson realized this two-minute delay was legitimately the worst transgression of their entire college careers.

"I don't think so," said Maye, the two-time Skip Prosser Award winner, Lowe's Senior CLASS Award winner, and multiple Academic All-America selection. "I think this is it for us."

He was completely serious.

Man, we're going to miss those guys.

Along with senior classmate Kenny Williams, Wednesday night marked the final Carolina basketball team event for one of the most beloved senior groups in the Roy Williams era. As assistant coach Hubert Davis said when talking about Maye—but he could have been talking about any of the three of them—"I desperately do not want Luke to go."

As always, Davis said it just right. Wednesday night was the first time it felt real that Johnson, Maye and Williams won't be on the 2019-20 Tar Heel roster. As Maye said when he walked to the podium to deliver his remarks, "I watched Brice and Marcus and Joel stand up here, and I thought, 'Man, that's a long time away.' And now it's here."

The senior speeches were the centerpiece of the evening, but there were other highlights, including the annual season review video compiled by Josh Reavis with assistance from Jon Leggette (especially of note was a certain Tar Heel caught on camera composing a Valentine's Day card but then sprinting out of view).

As per usual, the banquet (flawlessly put together again by Kaye Chase and the basketball office staff) also included some challenges to next year's team. Davis relayed Johnson's offseason schedule, when even recovery from hip surgery couldn't prevent him from getting to the gym at 8:30 in the morning to do spot shooting and ballhandling workouts. Steve Robinson relayed a message from Tyler Hansbrough earlier in the day, as the assistant coach had encountered the Tar Heel legend at the Smith Center. "To get on the floor and play, you have to do what Coach asks you to do. That gains his confidence," Robinson reported Hansbrough as saying.

The assistant coach looked over at the tables containing the returning players. "All of you want to play," he said. "The best way is to do what Coach asks you to do."

And the head coach made it very clear what he was asking them to do: work. "Maybe more than any team I've ever coached, your success was due to your work," Roy Williams told the 2019 Tar Heels. Those work habits very naturally appealed to a coach who makes no secret of his 24-hour/365-day passion for Carolina basketball. "In my 31 years as a head coach, this might be the easiest team to coach that I've ever had," he said.

Williams admitted that an end-of-season team banquet was perhaps an "old-fashioned" idea. But the Tar Heel coach relished the chance to hand out some awards, grant his seniors one more chance to thank those who had been instrumental in their Carolina careers, and deliver one more lesson to his team on the value of being a Tar Heel basketball player.

"Don't ever forget your teammates and what this program means to you," he told them in a perfect summation of the Carolina program. "Being a North Carolina basketball player is not just playing basketball. It's the relationships you build that you will have for the rest of your lives."

Players Mentioned

Cameron Johnson

Luke Maye

Kenny Williams

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