Lucas: Enormous

By Adam Lucas

GREENSBORO—Virginia Tech head coach Mike Young pondered his team's 81-73 defeat to North Carolina in Thursday's ACC Tournament quarterfinals. He saw the 43-32 rebounding edge held by the Tar Heels and the 17-10 advantage in second chance points. He pondered the difficulty of playing against this rotation:

Day'Ron Sharpe (6-foot-11, 265 pounds).

Armando Bacot (6-foot-10, 240 pounds).

Walker Kessler (7-foot-1, 245 pounds).

Garrison Brooks (6-foot-10, 240 pounds).

"Goodness gracious," Young said, "those guys are enormous."

And they are. But in Thursday's win, it was the smallest Tar Heel who made perhaps the biggest difference.

RJ Davis is listed at 6-foot-0, 160 pounds. It is entirely possible those measurements were done in shoes, or perhaps while standing on a phone book.

Against the Hokies, it didn't matter. Davis scored a career high 19 points and keyed the biggest sequence of the game.

"RJ is a tough kid," Roy Williams said, and it was a slight upset that we didn't get a "tough little nut" reference. But if Davis has more performances like Thursday, that's coming sooner rather than later.

Carolina led by one point with ten minutes to play when Davis had the most important 20 seconds of his Tar Heel career so far. It hadn't been a chippy game, but it had been intense. Virginia Tech very clearly had something to prove to a basketball world that isn't sure what to make of a squad that played only two games in the past month and backed into the third seed in the ACC Tournament.

The answer: they're good. And they were desperate to validate it. At one point in the second half, Hokie staff members on the bench led a "De-fense" chant while the Hokies tried to get a stop. Several Tar Heels had to seek treatment from athletic trainer Doug Halverson after on-court collisions. It was that kind of night.

The kind of game that was perfect for Carolina's resident New Yorker. Davis just kept playing. He confidently drained a three-pointer to give the Tar Heels a 53-49 lead. Then, when Hunter Cattoor (6-foot-3, 200 pounds, if it matters) let his attention waver for just a second, Davis reached in and swiped the ball, then jetted in for a basket and a foul.

In those 20 seconds, it was RJ 6, Hokies 0. And what had essentially been a one possession game for most of the second half felt changed. Carolina's lead would never sink under five points again.

"I hit a big three," Davis said as he described the sequence. "I kept telling myself, 'One stop.' Once I saw his back turned to me, I reached in and stole the ball and got an and-one. That changed the momentum of the game."

Davis has spent a large portion of his freshman season prone on the baseline after being knocked off his feet on drives to the basket. But in his first weekend of ACC Tournament competition, he was tough enough to absorb contact and play through it.

"I didn't want to go home," he said. "I didn't come here to lose."

There's something about this freshman class. They do not seem to recognize the fact that they are freshmen, don't seem to realize this is the time of year when veterans matter. A night after the freshmen scored 70 points in the win over Notre Dame (Davis had 14 points against the Irish), they added 51 more against the Hokies, a team that started one graduate student, two redshirt juniors, one redshirt sophomore and a sophomore.

For two straight games in Greensboro, the Tar Heel freshmen have scored more points each evening than any previous group of Carolina rookies in the ACC Tournament. The previous UNC freshman high in an ACC Tournament game was 49 in 2007.

They back up their box score production with unteachable intangibles. Do they throw the ball out of bounds on occasion and miss defensive assignments sometimes? Absolutely. But those mistakes will be corrected with repetition. And this can't be taught: they really, really hate to lose. And it showed against a Tech team that seemed intent on being the tougher team, only to encounter some unexpected resistance.

How strong is Davis' willingness to compete? He had more rebounds than the 6-foot-8 Leaky Black (who likewise drained a pair of huge three-pointers).  He had more boards than the 6-foot-4 Caleb Love. He had as many or more rebounds, in fact, than anyone on the team not named Sharpe, Bacot or Kessler.

"I don't really see myself as being small," Davis said. "I just go out and play hard every game as if I'm 6-5…You can say I'm short. But I play with my heart over height."

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Armando Bacot

Leaky Black

Garrison Brooks

RJ Davis

Walker Kessler

Caleb Love

Day'Ron Sharpe

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