Lucas: Doing The Math

By Adam Lucas

IOWA CITY—Roy Williams is dealing with a young team, so sometimes you have to make it very, very simple.

For example, you could give them this hypothetical: let's say Carolina is going to go on the road and play a basketball game against the third-ranked team in the country. Let's say that opponent has a National Player of the Year candidate, and is one of only eight Power Five teams in the country that returns at least 65 percent of its production from last year.

And let's say that before the game begins, the Tar Heels make a deal that the opponent can take 11 more field goal attempts than the visitors.

Doesn't sound like a great plan, does it? And yet that's what Carolina did by committing 18 turnovers in Iowa City on Tuesday night, which led directly to a 93-80 loss to Iowa.

Seniors often have basketball wisdom beyond their years. So listen to Garrison Brooks when he says, "Not turning the ball over would be the best thing we could do."

Every key stretch of the game was impacted by Carolina turnovers. When Iowa built a 25-9 lead at the start of the game, Carolina cooperated by turning it over on four of the first 13 possessions and six of the first 17 trips down the court. It's difficult to beat one of the nation's best teams on the road when a third of your scoring opportunities end without a shot.

Despite an Iowa three-point barrage, Carolina eventually battled back to take a one-point lead on two separate occasions midway through the second half—a stretch during which, not coincidentally, they turned it over just twice in the first ten minutes of the period.

But then things got sloppy again, and as the Tar Heels played their way out of the game, they turned it over on four out of five possessions during one decisive stretch.

"Carelessness and mistakes," said freshman RJ Davis, who had 12 points and eight assists to go with his three turnovers. "We have to fix the mistakes…We have to limit our turnovers."

Remember, Carolina's very best offensive strength at this point in the season is offensive rebounding. Turning it over doesn't just help the other team generate some quick offense—Iowa had 23 points off those 18 UNC mistakes—it also prevents Carolina from doing what they do best. You can't offensive rebound a turnover.

Iowa is a good offensive team, and might even prove to be a very good offensive team by the time we get into February or March (they're an excellent offensive team when they're swishing 17 three-pointers). There was always the possibility they were going to have stretches like the one late in the second half, when they put up 16 points on six possessions. That's Tar Heel-type offense. And Carolina has traditionally been able to counter that type of scoring output. But what did they do on Tuesday during that span?

A missed shot. Two separate empty trips to the free throw line by two different freshmen. A basket by Day'Ron Sharpe. And, of course, a turnover.

It was a frustrating but not discouraging night. The Tar Heels won't play many more complete teams than Iowa this year. All Fran McCaffrey's team was missing was a sellout crowd. It felt a little like an AAU tournament inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena, with no general admission attendance and family members from both teams scattered on opposite sides of the court.

In the minutes before the game started, you couldn't help but feel what was lost. This should have been a capacity crowd raising the temperature inside an arena that last saw a visit from North Carolina in 1989, a decade before anyone on the court was born. There should have been students relishing the chance to be seen on ESPN while shouting insults at the Tar Heels. There should have been a band. There should have been cheerleaders. There should have been Carolina fans from across the Midwest who somehow figured out a way to score a ticket on this rare Tar Heel trip to the Midwest.

There should have been multiple Nate Kellys inside the building. Kelly is a lifelong Carolina fan from Red Wing, Minnesota. He lives four hours and 13 minutes away from Iowa City and had circled this game since the schedule was announced. It had been four years since the last time the Tar Heels had been anywhere close to his hometown, and he would have gladly made the eight-hour roundtrip drive, proudly wearing that Carolina blue that follows the Tar Heels to every arena in the country, no matter how remote. Instead, he watched at home, like almost everyone else. Five games into this hopefully never duplicated again season, we're starting to get a little better appreciation for those in-person games, aren't we? Especially for those of us who are local, we're starting to understand how good we have it that we can just drive a few minutes or a couple hours to the Smith Center. Fans like Nate wait an entire Carolina Basketball cycle to see the team--the last time Carolina played close to him, Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson were on the roster--and he just missed a chance. It doesn't seem right.

Almost every word from the benches echoed around the empty stands. You could hear the Tar Heels shouting and encouraging each other in the tunnel before taking the court to what should have been raucous boos…but instead was dead silence except for the cheering from the 16 parents and family members who were in attendance. You don't realize how much you appreciate the passion Carolina generates on the road--both positive and negative--until it's absent.

So this is what it's like to be a normal college basketball team.

The Tar Heels typically thrive off that us-against-them mentality on the road, on listening for—as Roy Williams often says—the home crowd to go silent.

That wasn't possible on Tuesday, but that's the new normal in the sport right now. Understand that while this is an issue in this very small corner of the world, and that's the tiny corner we're talking about right now, this is not on the list of the top 100 problems facing the country at the moment. And it in no way had any impact whatsoever on who won the game. No matter how many people were there, Carolina needs to play better. And Iowa played in the exact same conditions. The Hawkeyes lost the opportunity to experience what likely would have been their marquee home game of the entire season. The generously estimated attendance was announced at 583. They saw what so often, when Carolina comes to town, feels like an event.

Instead, this was just a basketball game. A very simple, easy to explain basketball game. Carolina averaged just over one point on every possession in the game. They gave away 18 possessions. They lost by 13 points. Some turnovers are inevitable. But how much would you like to play out, say, half of those 18 possessions?

That's guaranteed to be a practice emphasis as Carolina enters an uncertain portion of the schedule in which the next game might be more than ten days away…or it might be sooner than that. Right this minute, no one knows. But they know one thing for certain:

"The thing that irritates me the most," Williams said, "is turnovers."

Players Mentioned

Garrison Brooks

RJ Davis

Day'Ron Sharpe

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