Forty Minutes to History
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. I will definitely give props to both Graves and Marcus Ginyard for playing with early foul problems and being able to still stay in the game and not put the coaching staff in more pressure than they were in to move the rotation. Ginyard didn’t score but his 10 boards were much needed while his three turnovers weren’t.
In all coach Williams showed he has no problem going deep with his bench, playing nine players, eight of them getting 19 or more minutes and all getting double digit minutes. Some tweets were done on why Henson was not playing more minutes in this one, the freshman got 22 in all. I think the fact that he missed a couple of easy shots and then became hesitant shooting, giving up the ball twice right next to the basket that instead of an assist turned into TOs, might have had something to do with it.
With all of this having been said, for both the UNC faithfuls and the ABC’ers/haters this game came down to the last play of the game. Where, after a shot by Drew a long rebound was made by a URI player. Said player began to dribble down the court with about five seconds left in the game. Behind him Graves was falling to the floor and might (or might not) have hit him, making him fall and losing the ball and URI losing the game. We can be all lawyers and take which side we would like of this story. For URI the case would be that the rule is “if a player is tripped it’s a foul” while for UNC it would argue “no call, no foul”. But, if we are going to be objective, there was more than that to this last second mayhem. Graves was not the only player on the floor and it seemed a lot more evident that he was hit by a URI player than he hit the URI player with the ball. Now, the fact that Graves said “no comment” with a smile when asked by the media about the play would make you think that he did touch the player, but that, after the game is neither here or there. In life they say that two wrongs (if there were 2) do not make a right, however on the basketball court they did, and that might just be the reason why the refs decided to hold their whistles and let the game go as it did.
Like it or not for the Heels fan base the win is a win, for the others it will always be the “play” more than the fact that Carolina won. But as I have said all year long, “it is what it is” and what it was last night was the Tar Heels winning ugly and heading to the NIT Finals, where once and for all the season will end, hopefully with another win away from home, another title and a piece of history being brought back to Chapel Hill. The game will be played once again in Madison Square Garden, with tip off being set for 7:00 p.m. EST, with ESPN televising it.
Shortlink:
