Lucas: It's A Start

By Adam Lucas

WINSTON-SALEM—Lawrence-Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum has seen more than its share of Carolina basketball history.

In this building, Dean Smith broke Adolph Rupp's all-time NCAA wins record. The joy of that day, from the Carolina Family assembling in the stands (in one of the toughest tickets ever) to Serge Zwikker pouncing on the game ball to preserve it for all-time to Smith's obvious discomfort with being the center of attention, was a spur of the moment Tar Heel basketball revival.

In this building, there have been blowouts and comebacks.

But never before, never in the 33 previous games the Carolina program has played in this building, has there been a game like this.

It ended up being a 92-85 Wake Forest win, but that wasn't even close to the story. It would be better to speak as little of this game as possible, but to understand the postgame scene, you have to understand what led to it. And what led to it was a first half that was simply a complete breakdown, one of the most frustrating halves of Carolina basketball in the current century. That half was primarily a Wake layup drill, featuring more Deac alley-oops than an Ed Cota to Vince Carter mix tape.

The score at halftime was 47-25, Wake Forest. You read that right—a 22-point lead after one half of basketball.

It was clear as the players left the court at halftime that some of them realized what had just happened. It was also clear that some of them were not as certain.

And then there was the second half. This sounds crazy now, but there was a moment with three minutes left when it really felt like Carolina was about to make the comeback. I know how that sounds—it didn't seem possible after the way the first half had gone. But the Heels had the ball down ten with three minutes left and Wake was contributing just the right mixture of quick shots and frazzled play. Hubert Davis had discovered some competitors on his bench, most notably Puff Johnson.

There was a very fleeting moment when it seemed that on the eighth anniversary of Dean Smith's death, the Tar Heels were about to pull off a very Smith-like comeback. But here's the thing about those comebacks: they require an almost impossibly perfect sequence of events. And Carolina could not be that perfect on Tuesday. They rushed some shots and sent Tyree Appleby to an ACC record night at the free throw line, and that combination was enough to seal the Wake win.

Lost in the wreckage of the first half is the fact that behind the Johnson-energized effort of the second half, Carolina scored 60 points in a second half for the first time in the Hubert Davis era. That they could score 60—more than they scored in the entire game in Durham on Saturday night—and still lose by seven is indicative of just how bad the first half had been.

Which takes us to the postgame, which will long be the lingering memory of this night. It is impossible to fully convey the emotion evident in Davis after he spent nearly 40 minutes in the locker room with his team after the game.

The Carolina head coach sat down with Jones Angell on the Tar Heel Sports Network. "We just had to have a talk," Davis said just minutes after the longest postgame closed locker room session I have seen in almost 25 years of doing this job. "We had to be able to communicate and find out what's holding us back from being the best team that I think we can possibly be. It was hard. It was long. It was good. And it was needed."

It was clear from Davis' shock at the first half effort that he had no warning signs this type of performance was approaching. "I thought our two days of practice were really good before this game," he said.

Here's the thing: he's not exaggerating. I attended both of those practices. They were legitimately good practices. Not just OK, but good. There was absolutely no sign—none—of the showing that was forthcoming in the first half on Tuesday night. Carolina looked for every moment of those sessions like a team that was ready to go to Winston-Salem and compete on Tuesday night.

But in the first half, they didn't. Which led to that postgame scene. Let me be perfectly honest: I was ready to write a postgame story about playing in this building, with so many memories, on the eighth anniversary of Smith's passing and how important he remains to all of us even almost a decade after he died. It's eight years after his passing and we're still wearing our Dear Deans. Maybe I'm wrong. But I don't think they're going to make Dear Knights or Dear Izzos or, nope, not even Dear Ks.

But after that game, you don't want to read that any more than I want to write it. It's very true that Coach Smith would have reminded us, "If you make every game a life or death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one, you're going to be dead a lot." He also likely would have told us that a billion people in China had no idea the game was even being played, which around halftime would have been enough to start looking into plane tickets to Beijing.

But he also won at a record-breaking clip. And no one treasures his legacy more than Hubert and Leslie Davis. That's part of why the loss seemed to weigh so heavily on the Carolina head coach. To wear these uniforms, to represent this school, and to perform in that fashion…it just isn't something he understands. He has made it clear he can't coach players if he doesn't know them. What he saw on Tuesday night, he doesn't know.

He'll spend the next three days trying to dissect it. It was instructive in the aftermath of the locker room session that Davis didn't try to pretend everything had been solved. He is well aware that you don't solve a first half like that with a 35-minute chat. The solution will be complex, and it may be painful for some, and it will require more talking and lots more basketball.

"I got some answers, not all of them," Davis said of the postgame meeting. "But it's a start. I'm happy with the start of the dialogue."

Players Mentioned

Puff Johnson

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