Lucas: Welcome To Maui

By Adam Lucas

ASHEVILLE—Welcome to Maui.

Once every four years, Roy Williams indoctrinates another Carolina team by taking them to one of his favorite locations in the world for the Maui Invitational.

The 2004-05 season didn't actually begin with a loss to Santa Clara in Oakland. It started with three impressive performances on the islands, with the Tar Heels putting up 106 points in the championship game against Iowa.

The 2008-09 campaign wasn't officially underway until Tyler Hansbrough came back from injury and goading by Bobby Frasor to outplay Luke Harangody in a Maui title win over Notre Dame.

The 2013 squad…well, never mind.

And the 2017 team's journey to Honolulu for a pedestrian win over Hawaii was nothing but essentially an exhibition before thrashing Chaminade, Oklahoma State and Wisconsin on the way to Williams' third Maui Invitational title at Carolina.

The lengthy trip virtually makes team bonding a requirement; the long plane rides, snorkeling and cliff jumping have helped form the bonds that eventually led to national championship teams.

Now there's 2020. Forget for just a moment that the backdrop is the Blue Ridge Mountains instead of the Hawaiian islands. Carolina plays an Atlantic Coast Conference basketball game in three weeks, and coming into Monday night, a team with six freshmen among its top ten players had exactly 40 minutes of experience against any team not wearing Alexander Julian argyle.

So maybe this isn't Maui. But it's still the Maui Invitational, and the event's importance to this year's Carolina team remains significant. And it's even more encouraging that the Tar Heels earned a 78-51 victory over UNLV in the quarterfinals that was more relentless than stylish. There will be nights this group shoots better than 41.7 percent from the field and 35.0 percent from the three-point line. There will be evenings they don't turn the ball over 16 times, and that they hit more than 66 percent from the free throw line.

But as they proved against the Runnin' Rebels, they can fall short in all of those categories...but they're still tall, and they're still capable of recording a 78-51 victory.

"We're so big and long," said 11-point scorer Andrew Platek of his team. He means more than just in the paint, where Carolina used a quartet of big men to grab 24 rebounds, or just 11 fewer than the entire UNLV team. But none of Garrison Brooks, Armando Bacot, Day'Ron Sharpe or Walker Kessler recorded as many boards as Leaky Black, who had ten. And while it wasn't Black's night offensively (1-for-9), his defense on Bryce Hamilton was stellar, showing a glimmer of defensive possibility for an element that all those previous Maui teams have included—the ability to lock down an opponent when needed. Carolina was a team-high +26 with Black on the court and overall held UNLV to a miniscule 0.71 points per possession.

It's too early to expect a complete 40-minute performance, so those brief glimpses—hopefully sustained long enough to amount to a win—are the best possible outcome at this point in the season. It's why Walker Kessler's terrific 120 seconds midway through the second half were so encouraging, as he converted a three-point play, scored twice off offensive rebounds, and mixed in throwing his seven-foot body on the ground for a loose ball.

Cheering for that hustle play was perhaps the most animated reaction Williams had all evening. Because he knows there will be nights when Kessler has the same struggles Day'Ron Sharpe faced on Monday (zero field goal attempts and four turnovers in 16 minutes), but right now he just wants to find a way to make his team into an actual team by the time that ACC opener arrives. On multiple occasions in Williams' Carolina career, he's watched the Tar Heels arrive in Maui as talented individuals with loads of potential and depart as a formidable team that believes in itself. Monday's win was a very small step in that direction.

"I hope and think," Williams said, "we learned a lot from tonight."

The competition will get more stout on Tuesday with a Stanford team coached by Jerod Haase that will know every single offensive and defensive play Carolina runs. Haase is so intimately involved with Carolina Basketball that he orchestrated the reorganization of the banners in the Smith Center rafters. That's how important and trusted he was as a member of Williams' staff. It will be a very Maui Invitational type of challenge, and there's no guarantee of the outcome—sometimes you blow away Oregon, as in 2008, and sometimes the 2012 Butler defense is a little too tough.

At this point, though, nothing is a surprise. After Monday's win, the Tar Heels boarded the bus for the short ride back to the hotel housing all eight of the teams in the event. The bus turned out into the Asheville night, and snow peppered the windows.

Welcome to Maui.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Armando Bacot

Leaky Black

Garrison Brooks

Walker Kessler

Andrew Platek

Day'Ron Sharpe

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