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“I had a dream last night that North Carolina was playing in the national championship game, and…”

Posted on January 16, 2008 by Staff

By Frank Heath
Sports Columnist

Will this UNC basketball team go down in history as one of the Tar Heels’ best-ever?
The Tar Heels, whose 93-62 skunking of ACC rival NC State on Saturday was their seventeenth win without a defeat, are certainly positioning themselves to be “in the conversation.”

The last Carolina team to reach 17-0 was the 1997-98 team that included Antawn Jamison, Shammond Williams, Vince Carter, Ed Cota, Ademola Okulaja, Brendan Haywood … and was pretty darned good itself. But the ‘98 Tar Heels will not be remembered among the very top echelon by most because they did not reach the national championship game.

The judging criteria in such an argument are pretty stringent, and the current UNC team, while on a roll, is not even halfway to its destination. Certainly by going undefeated this year (which in this day of expanded schedules would extrapolate to 40-0!), Carolina could join the hallowed company of the 1956-57 team, a 32-0 national champion. The odds of UNC doing that, though, remain quite low, as no Division I team has survived unbeaten since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers.

These Tar Heels will lose at some point, and chances are they may look bad in doing it.

UNC’s national championship teams in 1982, ’93 and 2005 all suffered losses against the Wake Forest Deacons, and all three of them looked, on those days, like pretty ordinary basketball squads. The ‘77 Tar Heels, who reached the title game before losing against Marquette, suffered an awful 20-point defeat at Clemson that season before reeling off 17 straight wins.

It was how these earlier champions responded to their losses, more than the losses themselves, that determined their destinies.

Now it appears as though this year’s UNC team will decide its destiny by the way they play defense.

With Ty Lawson running the break at warp speed, Wayne Ellington becoming a more calculating assassin from the wing with each week and the great All-American Tyler Hansbrough showing no signs of slowing down or tiring, the Tar Heels have all the pieces in place on offense to compete with the best the rest of the country has to offer. They are pretty good at rebounding, as well. But Coach Roy Williams has reminded anyone who will listen this year that his guys need to “guard the ball” better.

In the runaway win over State, Carolina saw firsthand the sort of results that it can get by playing defense well. The effort started – as it must – out front, with Lawson and Ellington pushing State’s perimeter ballhandlers 30 feet out from the basket, sometimes even pinning the Pack’s guards at half-court.

But Carolina’s defensive assault did not end or even slow down there, as everyone on the team was active on “d.” Once State did maneuver the ball into the post, UNC’s double teams came quick, passing lanes were impeded and shot blockers were on alert. Carolina batted away eight shots in the first half alone, and Danny Green and Deon Thompson altered as many shots as they blocked. State missed 18 consecutive field-goal attempts, and, as Carolina’s offense fed off of the team’s defensive intensity, the Pack could only watch as the Tar Heels ran off 25 unanswered points. The domination was so complete that the game’s eventual outcome was obvious several minutes before halftime.

If these Tar Heels will consistently give that sort of effort on defense, they’ll make themselves a difficult team to beat. What it will require is a considerable number of those elements that do not necessarily register on the stat sheet, but that coaches can identify in a split second: things like hustle, effort, focus, determination and execution.

Those same coaches will remind everyone that offense is more like fun, while defense is more like hard work; but when defense is done right, the resulting consequence can be just as fun.

The 1993 national championship team took to defense naturally, while the talented UNC team that won the national championship in 2005 was able to recognize the challenge it faced and elevate its defense to match the way it already could play on offense. If the 2007-08 Tar Heels do the same, there is no reason why they can’t end up “in the conversation” when people 10, 20 and 30 years down the road talk about the greatest North Carolina teams ever. But for this team, defense remains an if, not a given, as one game a season does not make.

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