Lucas: Attention Campers

By Adam Lucas

Furman coach Bob Richey was standing on the Smith Center court about an hour before Tuesday's game against North Carolina when he made a very simple observation.

Richey is not just the Furman head coach. He's also a two-time former Carolina basketball camper, a veteran of the Granville Towers dorms who remembers watching Jerry Stackhouse take on all comers on the Granville court. Richey's counselor was Jeff McInnis. Rasheed Wallace was around.

It was a pretty incredible time to be a Tar Heel…or a Tar Heel basketball camper.

So Richey knows about Carolina basketball, and he of course realized his Paladins were going to start four guards with a starting lineup where the tallest member was 6-foot-7 Jalen Slawson.

"We're going to have to survive the inside," Richey said.

Like many other Carolina opponents who have ventured into the Smith Center, Furman couldn't quite do it. Even in the new era that is Hubert Davis basketball, pounding it inside still works, rebounding—especially offensive rebounding—still matters, and two-pointers can eventually outpace three-pointers if you get enough of them and shoot them efficiently enough.

That's exactly what the Tar Heels did on the way to a 74-61 win over the Paladins.

It probably would have shocked McInnis or Stackhouse that Carolina came into the game as one of the five best three-point shooting teams in the country. They shot the ball an uncharacteristically poor 31.3 percent from the arc on Tuesday, but they were able to pull away in the second half because of a very Dean Smith/Roy Williams principle: get it to the big guy.

That had worked in the first half, when Dawson Garcia scored eleven points in the first five minutes on a variety of baskets, flashing the kind of inside-outside ability that Davis felt would be a perfect fit in Chapel Hill.

"Dawson got us going," Davis said in his postgame Tar Heel Sports Network interview with Jones Angell. "His energy and effort running the floor, his offensive rebounding and finishing around the basket was important. I really felt like his start on the offensive end put us in a good position."

Garcia also set the tone for the game by playing unselfishly even when he could've been excused from hoisting a few more shots. He had a pretty early assist when he loaded a three-pointer, causing the defense to rush to him, opening a passing lane for a touch pass to Armando Bacot. Later in the half, Furman doubled Garcia, only to watch him find an open Leaky Black for a dunk.

Garcia's three assists for the game were as many as his previous five games combined, and he's now grabbed 17 rebounds in the last two games after getting 13 in the previous four.

The big man's passing was emblematic of his team's progress, as the Tar Heels have now assisted on at least 60 percent of their field goals in two of the last three games. Caleb Love and RJ Davis handed out a combined 11 assists against the Paladins, with many of them coming to the big man trio that piled up a 44-26 advantage in points in the paint.

Davis emphasized to his team this week in practice that the Tar Heel big men would be guarded by smaller players on Tuesday. The Armando Bacot/Brady Manek/Garcia trio took advantage, shooting a combined 20-for-33 and pulling down 11 offensive rebounds.

The Tar Heel head coach had identified three areas where he wanted his team to use its size advantage against Furman:

Scoring down low in the paint—mission accomplished, with that 44-26 edge

Getting second chance opportunities—again, Carolina checked this box, holding a 19-0 lead in second chance points.

The third area was the only one where Carolina fell short, as the Tar Heels didn't capitalize at the free throw line as frequently as Davis would have preferred. But Carolina still shot 9-for-14 at the line and is shooting a very solid 74.4 percent from the charity stripe this season.

"Our bigs," Davis said, "established us on the offensive end."

That's good old-fashioned Tar Heel basketball. Just like they taught it at Carolina basketball camp.

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Armando Bacot

Leaky Black

RJ Davis

Dawson Garcia

Caleb Love

Brady Manek

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