Lucas: Joy To The World

By Adam Lucas

The funny thing about a basketball season is that you never know where the turning points might be.

This looked like a fairly nondescript two-game homestand, as Carolina finally returned to the Smith Center to host Georgia Tech and The Citadel. It's not the most marquee part of the schedule. It's not a segment anyone circled when the schedule was released.

But it might be the time when the 2022-23 Tar Heels realized that playing basketball could indeed be fun.

The first nine games of the season were a slog. There was a lot of dribbling, a lot of missed shots, and the game didn't seem to be coming very easily to anyone wearing argyle.

Which is what makes it so stunning that now we're talking about a team that has handed out 39 assists in the last two games. The Tar Heels had 13 assists on 14 field goals in Tuesday's first half—that first half total is more assists than they had in the entire Indiana and Virginia Tech games combined.

Maybe it all started when the Tar Heels gathered in the locker room to douse Jalen Washington with water after his season debut on Saturday. That simple act of remembering that they are a team, that this is still the same game they loved playing in the driveway, seems to have unlocked something.

And remember: for the last two seasons, Carolina has been at its best when no one is paying attention. The Tar Heels started the season ranked number-one in the country and that national acclaim seemed burdensome. Now they've dropped completely out of the top 25, and—just as they did last year, when they slowly started to make improvements out of the national eye—they're starting to look more like a capable team.

Davis has talked to the squad extensively about finding joy in the success of others. On Tuesday, it looked like they understood. That's why Pete Nance was leading the cheers for Armando Bacot when the Smith Center video boards announced that Bacot had broken Billy Cunningham's record for double-figure rebounding games. And that's why Caleb Love looked almost gleeful when Tyler Nickel crashed the offensive glass and created a loose ball, which then enabled Love to find Nickel in the corner for a three-pointer.

Love celebrated Nickel's shot even more than he had rejoiced at his own three-pointer a possession earlier. He spent most of the second half actively trying to find the open man, sometimes at the expense of his own offense, including dropping a nice pass to Dontrez Styles for a fast break dunk and then throwing a gorgeous feed to Nickel from the top of the key for an old-fashioned three-point play midway through the second half.

It was pretty basketball. Even the passes that didn't lead to a basket—Love easily could have had a couple more assists "the way we keep them," as Dean Smith used to say—were well-intended, as when Styles threw a very nice pass over the top to Jalen Washington later in the half. The shot was errant, but the ball movement was stellar.

"We are trusting each other more," Nickel said. "Everyone doesn't feel like they have to take the whole thing on their shoulders. They are seeing more and more of what everyone can do, and everyone on the team is gaining trust. The more we move the ball, the more we put each other at an advantage, and we've begun to see that."

It simply has to be more fun to play this way. By the time Jackson Watkins swished a three-pointer to reach the 100-point mark—in what was essentially the eight points in 17 seconds of biscuits, as the reserves put up five points in the final minute to pull it off—the entire bench was cheering and dancing.

"It can," Hubert Davis said simply, "be fun."

Sure, it's easy to have fun when you're shooting 15-for-31 from three-point range. But there's a chance the Tar Heels might have found something in this two-game homestand. We'll know much more against better competition in the next two outings, with Ohio State waiting in New York and Michigan in Charlotte.

But there's something to build on here, at the most unexpected of moments in a very long season.

"I don't know how you can do anything absent of emotion," Davis said. "Whether you're a husband or a father or a basketball player, the joy in being able to do those things should bring out all different types of emotions. In the second half, they were smiling and communicating. That's the way to play basketball, with passion and enthusiasm."

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University of North Carolina Athletics

Players Mentioned

Armando Bacot

Caleb Love

Pete Nance

Tyler Nickel

Dontrez Styles

Jalen Washington

Jackson Watkins

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