Lucas: Scenes

By Adam Lucas

PITTSBURGH—You didn't have to watch all of Carolina's 66-52 defeat at Pittsburgh on Saturday (and right now, maybe you're wishing you didn't). You didn't need to spend those two hours of your Saturday to ascertain what's happening right now with the Tar Heel basketball team.

Instead, you could watch just these three plays, and you'd have a pretty firm handle on what's happening with Carolina right now:

Scene 1: The first possession of the second half. The scoreboard reads Pittsburgh 43, Carolina 23. But you don't even need to see the scoreboard to realize something very wrong is happening.

All you have to do is look down to the end of the court opposite the Tar Heel bench, where Carolina will be on defense. And as the Panthers prepare to inbound the ball, the five Tar Heels on the court—Leaky Black, Armando Bacot, Andrew Platek, Garrison Brooks and Brandon Robinson—don't pick up a man, as Tar Heel players have done at the start of the second half in virtually every single one of the 603 games Roy Williams has served as Carolina's head coach. Instead, the Tar Heels did something at the outset of the half that is completely antithetical to everything Williams has coached for in the past 32 seasons: they dropped back in a zone. Longtime observers speculated that starting the second half in a zone had probably happened fewer than five times in those 603 games.

It was like watching the Showtime Lakers walk the ball up the court or Virginia sprint downcourt and fling the ball up within three seconds or Dean Smith using all his timeouts in the first half. You knew, intellectually, that the first half hadn't been good. But somehow, watching Platek and Robinson drop back and defend an area of the court rather than an opponent made it more real. It's come to this. Roy Williams just opened the second half in a zone.

"We were getting our butts kicked doing the other thing," the head coach said after the game. "Got to try something."

And they did. The Tar Heels played about a dozen possessions of zone in the game, and mixed it up with a couple of halfcourt traps and even one possession of 44 (full-court) defense. The multiple defenses were at least partially responsible for Pitt's second half offensive struggles, and on a day when there weren't many positives, the Tar Heels' ability to vary their defensive looks was a glimmer of hope. Of course, the challenge would be to defend for a full 40 minutes; the Tar Heels weren't good defensively at all in the first half.

Scene 2: A couple minutes later in the second half. Carolina had gotten three quick baskets to open the half, and had the ball and a chance to get the deficit under 15 points (granted, this doesn't sound like a great achievement, but it should give you a window into the struggles of the first half).

Between the moment that Leaky Black grabbed the defensive rebound and the time Carolina relinquished the ball, the following happened:

Pittsburgh committed three fouls.

The Panthers called timeout.

Armando Bacot missed a shot in the paint.

Garrison Brooks grabbed the rebound.

Brooks missed the follow attempt.

In all, the Tar Heels possessed the ball for 57 seconds, a quantity of time that would be enough for a quick 8-0 run for many Williams-coached teams. But the Tar Heels couldn't score.

To add to the frustration, Pitt needed exactly two seconds from the time Au'diese Toney collected the defensive rebound to the moment when Terrell Brown sank an open jumper. That's what kind of day it was. The Carolina offense chugged through 57 seconds of desperately hoping to get a basket…and then Pitt needed just two seconds to show how it was done.

Scene 3: This was the one that broke your heart. Garrison Brooks is having a stellar junior season, and was on his way to recording his fifth straight double-double. He continues to be the rock you can absolutely depend on even when everything else is going wrong.

But he is also an upperclassman on a Carolina team that is under .500 at this point in the season for the first time in almost two decades. That's not an easy burden to carry, and the frustration showed about seven minutes into the second half.

On that possession, Pitt got caught in a mismatch and had the 6-foot-3 (generously) Xavier Johnson guarding Brooks. The Tar Heel junior called for the ball, first visibly, and then audibly. But his freshman teammate either didn't see him or didn't think he could make the pass, and Brooks was demonstrably frustrated with the breakdown. For most of the season, Brooks has collected his double-doubles quietly, rarely saying anything beyond the minimum. He has played without complaint through a busted mouth in last year's NCAA Tournament and a painful eye injury in the Bahamas this past November.

If you wonder if the Tar Heels feel the pressure of what's happening to them, the answer was right there in his reaction: never a complainer, never someone who has cared at all about his own offensive stats, there was Brooks, frustrated with a teammate.

The Tar Heel coaches pulled him from the game at the next opportunity, and after a short conversation with Steve Robinson, he was back on the court, once again stoic. But his reaction in that half a second told you everything you needed to know about this day and about how this team feels in mid-January.

"I'm one of those corny people who thinks athletics is good for you and teaches you how to handle some adversity," Williams said. "Right now, we have to handle quite a bit of adversity."

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Armando Bacot

Leaky Black

Garrison Brooks

Andrew Platek

Brandon Robinson

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