Dec. 13, 2008
By Adam
Lucas
Let's first acknowledge that Roy Williams liked Saturday night's Carolina performance about as much as a fresh shipment of NCAA floor decals. His distress was based mostly on a listless second half that saw Oral Roberts do the unthinkable--become the first team all season to outscore the Tar Heels in a half.
The Golden Eagles won the second half, 50-46.
"We were not sharp at all," Williams said. "We were not good defensively at all...I was not pleased at all with what we did on the backboards or on the defensive end."
Of course, by the time all that displeasure began mounting, Carolina had already raced to a 54-34 halftime lead and the game was essentially decided. Even with Oral Roberts's Robert Jarvis channeling Randolph Childress, the lead was never in danger of dropping into single digits.
Every season--and virtually every December--has games like this. But every December is not like this. Why?
Because this team gets it.
For four years, since David Noel was the senior leader and this year's seniors were the wide-eyed freshmen, Williams has preached to them about seeing the big picture. Four years ago, it was about how Noel saw the big picture but the youngsters, in most cases, didn't.
Too often in college basketball we get cheated out of seeing teams grow up. What might Brandan Wright have been like as a junior? How smooth would Joseph Forte have been as a senior? What about a team that included Stackhouse, Wallace, Jamison and Carter on the same team?
But this year's group, we've seen develop. And so we eventually get a team that functions as a whole rather than as individuals. You see it on offense, where we get pearls like Ed Davis (funny how team play from the upperclassmen seems to trickle down to the rookies) throwing a beautiful post-to-post pass to Deon Thompson for a basket, or Wayne Ellington sacrificing his body to set a nice screen on the beefy Marcus Lewis to free Tyler Hansbrough for an open jumper.
But you see it more on defense.
On the last Oral Roberts possession of the first half, Dominique Morrison was trying to kill the clock with a few lazy dribbles 40 feet from the basket. The Tar Heels wouldn't let him.
"Run at him!" Williams barked at Tyler Hansbrough. That seems simple enough. Morrison wasn't Hansbrough's man, but Hansbrough's double-team set in motion a series of rotations.
Would the Tar Heels have followed that same series of rotations even one year ago? Doubtful. Did they on Saturday night? Yes, and the possession eventually ended with a deflection and two Danny Green free throws that provided the 20-point halftime margin.
"We see the big picture better now," said Wayne Ellington. "When we get those defensive calls, we know the rotation. We know who will be in which passing lane and who will be the goaltender. It's a habit, and it kind of becomes muscle memory when it's being called. You just know which spot to be in at the right time."
That changes the way a team can play the game. Now a junior, Ty Lawson is entrusted with making many of the team's defensive calls. If you think you've been seeing more Tar Heel traps this year, you're right--and there's a reason.
"I have more confidence that people will rotate the right way when we do trap and we won't give them open shots," Lawson said. "I called the traps a lot today, and that's because we've all bought into the system and we all try to rotate and play the way (Coach Williams) tells us to play."
Consider this coaching clinic from Bobby Frasor. Every day of preseason practice, Williams puts his players through a ball/help/deny drill designed to emphasize the different stages of half-court defense. It's pretty simple--you can be playing the ball, you can be in help position (more than one pass from the ball), or you can be in deny position (one pass away).
Here, listen to Frasor:
"If I'm two passes away, if my guy is below the free throw line I have a foot in the lane. That way if someone gets beat I can step in and get the charge. Above the free throw line, I have to be ready to shoot through the passing lane and think one pass ahead."
And if he's one pass away?
"I want a hand in the passing lane so my man can't get it easily. If he goes out, you keep going with him."
He's done that every day in practice for four years. So when he played it exactly the way he described it midway through the first half and sniffed out a steal and an easy layup, it was part instincts and part fundamentals, but it was more than that--it was routine.
"Even though this is our last year, we still did that drill every day for two weeks straight," Frasor said. "Basically, it's like second nature to me right now. That's just how we play."
Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of four books on Carolina basketball.
