Lucas: Old Guys Rule

By Adam Lucas

CORAL GABLES—Thank goodness for the old guys.

Carolina's freshmen kept the Tar Heels in Tuesday night's game at Miami. Kerwin Walton pumped in three three-pointers, and Day'Ron Sharpe had 12 points and 16 rebounds, and Caleb Love played through a tough shooting night to make a clutch three-pointer for his only basket of the game.

That was enough to keep Carolina close to a depleted Miami team. But it was the upperclassmen who won it. Junior Leaky Black completed perhaps his best offensive game as a Tar Heel by swishing his fourth three-pointer in as many attempts, and senior Garrison Brooks stepped to the free throw line and made a pair of key shots, and senior Andrew Platek drove baseline for the game-winner.

And that's how you complete a comeback from a nine-point deficit on the road in the final six and a half minutes of an Atlantic Coast Conference game. Forget for just a second how Carolina got into that hole against a Miami team that remains winless in the league. The fact is that Carolina climbed out of it.

They did it with a perhaps unlikely trio. Even this season, Platek's contributions have often been of the intangible variety. Black and Brooks lost their starting jobs a week ago. And yet, there they all were making big plays in the key moments of Tuesday's win.

Their ability to stay composed while situations were tenuous was a major asset—perhaps a determinative asset. For example, it felt like Love was completely unaware he was 0-for-8 before he launched that three-pointer that swished through. That makes it easier to keep firing. But with Brooks, you could definitely tell he was feeling the weight of his 1-for-7 performance, in which his only made basket was a dunk and he also missed a slam. When he left the game with four fouls late in the second half, the veteran looked demoralized. This is not how a senior year is supposed to happen.

Put it this way: how confident did you feel that he was going to make those two free throws? And if your confidence was shaky, imagine how Brooks must have felt. He was 2-for-4 from the line in the game and came into the contest hitting just a touch above 50 percent of his free throws. No one was more aware of his struggles than he was.

But in this situation he was, as Roy Williams frequently says, tough enough to make them.

"I was telling him during the game, 'We've got you,'" Platek said of Brooks. "'You're that guy for us.' When he stepped up to the line for those two big free throws, there was no doubt in my mind they were going in."

May we all have the confidence of a teammate instead of the pessimism of an outsider.

Before you get too dismayed by the artistic quality of the last two games, remember this: they were also two victories. No one's going to recall in March that Carolina struggled to win at Miami. They're only going to know it was a victory. And if the last two games can be some type of springboard—it's the first time the Tar Heels have enjoyed two straight wins by such a tight margin in the regular season since January 10 and 14 of 2015—we'll be looking at the trip to Coral Gables as a positive, no matter how it seems right now.

There's a certain positive in a team being able to play so poorly but yet pull out of the spiral in time to win the game instead of just allowing the struggles to cascade to a loss. The negative, of course, is that the Tar Heels are capable of playing as badly as they did during the first 34 minutes. But there might be enough glimmer of hope in those final six minutes to see a better future.

Dramatic improvements are needed. The Tar Heels have to develop some kind of consistency between the inside and outside games. Carolina hit 9-for-20 from the three-point line on Tuesday, a whopping 45 percent accuracy that just a couple of weeks ago would have solved the team's biggest offensive concern.

But as the shots from outside have begun to fall, the shots from inside have disappeared. Carolina made a meager 12-for-41 from two-point range against the Canes, struggles that would have seemed impossible earlier in the season. Brooks, Bacot, Sharpe and Walker Kessler combined to go 7-for-26 from the floor against Miami. The Canes do not have a distinguished post game, yet outscored Carolina 32-24 in the paint.

Eventually, a game is coming in which the Tar Heels hit from both the inside and the outside. Think of it this way: Carolina has now proven, in games against legitimate competition, that they are capable of shooting the ball from the perimeter (free throw numbers are also trending up, and the Tar Heels converted nearly 73 percent of them against Miami, making them look more like the team that Williams has consistently claimed can be a good shooting squad). Carolina has also proven, in games against legitimate competition, that they are capable of scoring from the inside.

Now, would it be too much to ask for them to demonstrate those qualities in the same game?

Until then, Carolina will have to rely on effective defense and some veteran wisdom. Platek, for example, was perfectly aware that in that particular late game situation, Williams would eschew a timeout and play the game out to avoid allowing the opponent to set a defense, as he did at Florida State in 2009 or in the regional final in 2017. And Black had been in enough battles to realize that although the game had been ugly, it was still winnable. And that was the message he delivered to his teammates.

"With three minutes left we were down by four," Black said. "We were playing the worst game we could possibly play right now and we were only down four. Get one stop at a time."

That was veteran perspective that helped provide a veteran win. And that was better than the alternative on a Tuesday night in Miami.

Players Mentioned

Leaky Black

Garrison Brooks

Walker Kessler

Caleb Love

Andrew Platek

Day'Ron Sharpe

Kerwin Walton

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