UNC 100 Celebration
Last night’s game between North Carolina (20-16) and Rhode Island (26-10) was anything but perfect, each team committed 17 turnovers, sloppy play dominated wide stretches of the game, and so on and so forth. But when it was all said and done, including five minutes of overtime, UNC was still perfect in the NIT, winning the game by the score of 68 to 67 and moving on to Thursday’s match up against Dayton. So, before I go on with this post let me say this to the masses: cut this team a break will ya! No, they are not the 2005 or 2009 title teams, but they are out there bring to a nice conclusion what could have been a season that ended with blow out in Durham and a one and done in the ACC Tournament. This team has gone from 2 and 9 in their first eleven away games to winning three in a row outside the friendly confine of Chapel Hill.
We have gone from a team that some wondered if they get to 2,000 wins this season, end the year at .500 or above, to a squad that is one game away from bringing home the National Invitation Tournament title, and making history in doing so. Yesterday I was watching Outside the Lines with @bonami_jones on it and they said that for a lot of the Tar Heels the season ended when the Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament was done for UNC. For all of those “fans” out there: shame on you! Had the Athletic Department listened to you all we would be hearing now (until Late Night with Roy) is how this team ended .500 and even that record was a miracle. Now we are finishing the `09-`10 season with 20 wins, having a chance of winning the NIT Tournament and being the first team to ever win the NCAA one year and the NIT the following. It might not be much, it is not going to erase the season (and the 16 losses), but it is sure a whole heck of a lot better than how it could have ended up.
Again, was it a perfect execution? No! Was it poetry in motion as far as the game is concerned? No! But on the other side of the coin if I told you that UNC would end up with 17 turnovers, go 2 for 16 from beyond the arc and miss half of their 16 free throws what would you say the outcome of the game would have been? Most likely a slaughter by the other team. Guess what, it wasn’t, and while some might be because URI didn’t play well either, some is also because our guys gave it what they had on the court. I read the tweets and seen the web boards, this team is not getting a fair shake in my opinion, and yet they are still in this tournament and fourty minutes away from winning it.
It was once again Larry Drew that made the plays down the stretch, and while his 4 assists to 4 turnovers is all a lot of the ABC’ers/haters/rivals and even some of our own are talking about, if you watched the game and were unbias, Drew could have had twice as many assists if some of those three’s would have gone in, or even some of the lay ups/dunks would have gone through the basket as well. Reality being is that you can get the ball to your team mates, they need to score in order for them to get the points and you the assist. Still talking about the sophomore point guard, who brought the team back from five points down with less than two minutes to go, can we just all agree that the play head coach Roy Williams set up for the final seconds was not him shooting a three. It was a clear out, putting the big way outside so that Rhode Island’s bigs could not block the lay up, as Drew drove to the basket (like he has done many times in this tournament). I think he saw that who was marking him was not going to give him the lane, he pulled up, shot, and like most every other three in this game, it didn’t go in.
But, as I have said for quite sometimes on this web page of mine, the bread and butter of North Carolina is the inside game. In my preview of the game I said that the three bigs (Deon Thompson, John Henson and Tyler Zeller) all needed to score in double figures, and with the exception of Henson (6 points) the others did, Thompson getting his second double double in a row with 16 points and 13 rebounds and Zeller scoring 12 and grabbing 5. Henson did get 11 rebounds on the night, and both he, Thompson and Zeller finished with two block shots a piece. Of the 68 points scored by the Tar Heels last night over 50 were in the paint, if that is not telling this team something I am not sure anything is. One last comment about a big man who didn’t play, it was quite nice to see Ed Davis getting up with the rest of the team to cheer when his team mates made shots.
I liked how Will Graves went to the basket in this game, but cringed everytime he went for a three shot (1 for 7), and even if his only made one was a key one in the overtime session it’s always that “no, no, no, yessssss” feeling you get when he loads up to shoot. Along with the redshirt junior we have freshman Leslie McDonald, who just do not seem to get that you can pass the ball when it is passed to you, and his 1 for 6 performance (1 for 3 from three point range) showed his greater need to take shots as opposed to passing the ball more.
