-Ty Lawson sent a message by taking only three shots against the Yellow Jackets. He read in the paper and on message boards all week about how he was shooting too much...and he essentially shut up his critics with an 11 assist game. Don't know if he'll get ACC Player of the Year...but he definitely deserves consideration for first team All-America point guard. Steph Curry's a great player...but I think I'd take Lawson over him right now.
-UNC's defense the first ten minutes of the game was abysmal - Georgia Tech was getting whatever it wanted and I didn't think this is how the Tar Heels would respond to the upset loss against Maryland. It might have been the early tip-off (12:00 p.m. one of UNC's earliest games this season) because North Carolina stepped up its defense big-time to close the half. The 'd' did get lackadaisical once UNC settled into a comfortable lead...but that's just the way this team plays. The regular season isn't exciting any more for the players...they're just cruising until tournament time (well...and a date with Duke this weekend).
-Georgia Tech's Gani Lawal attempted the ugliest free throws I've ever seen in a college basketball game during Saturday's action. The first was an air-ball that was a good foot to two feet short of the rim, and the second was way short and way to the left (and just barely glanced off the side of the rim...I was hoping for another air-ball). I was shocked when the sportswriter next to me announced that Lawal was shooting better than 60% from the stripe. Maybe the 'wine and cheese' Smith Center crowd caused him to briefly forget how to shoot a basketball.
-Tyler Hansbrough looked awesome. He's disappeared in several big games this season but showed his skills off in this one, displaying soft touch on those weird one-handed shots he takes near the rim.
-As info: Danny Green has started out every one of the post-game interviews I've been at this season with the same comment to the media - "If you all don't need me just let Matt Bowers (UNC Student Information Director) know." I don't know if that's actually funny to anyone else, but I always crack a smile when he says that coming into the room.
-Media members jam their tape recorders way too close to athletes' faces. I understand TV people wanting to make sure they get their station's logo in the video...but a word of advice for print journals: your recorder works just as well two to three feet away from the person's mouth as it does less than six inches.
-Pregame meal for the media: Qdoba...fixed myself a nachos mixed with chicken plate...and restrained myself to only two beverages from the free drinks cooler in the media room.
Here's a link to my story from the UNC/GT matchup this weekend.
And here's the text from the story:
After No. 4 North Carolina's upset loss to Maryland, one word kept coming to mind for Ty Lawson and Wayne Ellington when assessing UNC's performance.
Selfish.
Registering only five assists as a team tends to create that association. The Tar Heels floundered due to a lack of rapid ball movement, shooting just 37.7 percent from the floor and crumbling down the stretch. To add insult to injury, Greivis Vasquez managed to double UNC's assist total all by himself.
Bobby Frasor said afterwards that the team didn't "play the way we've been taught to play," and the team was left with a week to stew over their underwhelming offensive display.
"We didn't emphasize just the assists. We emphasized sharing the basketball, and we emphasized the 16 really, really, really bad shots that we took up at Maryland," coach Roy Williams said. "We had very complete practices. I didn't try to kill anybody. I didn't put anyone on the end line and say you've got to run until three people puke or anything like that. We tried to get better as a basketball team."
Talk about an understatement. Even with the absence of mandatory hurling, Williams still grabbed his players' attention with a gauntlet of strenuous drills and exhaustive film study.
"It was probably in the top three hardest practices of all time since I've been here," Tyler Hansbrough said.
Fast forward to the Tar Heels' 104-74 blowout win against Georgia Tech on Saturday - the Tar Heels got Williams' message.
North Carolina (25-3, 11-3) bounced back on offense to the tune of 26 assists on its 37 made field goals, finishing the game with a blazing 53.6% shooting percentage. It didn't matter if a guard, forward or center had the ball - everyone was looking to pass. Even a trio of UNC bigs - Ed Davis, Tyler Zeller and Deon Thompson - combined for six assists.
All in all, nine UNC players were credited with a helper in the box score.
After putting up 20 shots against Maryland, Lawson took just three against the Yellow Jackets. Although he misfired on all three attempts, Lawson directed UNC's attack with ease, dishing out 11 assists to lead the team.
"I told him in the locker room that may be as good as I've ever seen a point guard play when he didn't score a field goal," Williams said.
"(On) three or four of (Ty's passes) I know we missed a layup and (on) two or three of them we got fouled, so there could have been more assists for him."
Lawson eschewed several open shot opportunities in order to make an extra pass in the post or around the perimeter. After the game, he credited his teammates for their movement away from the ball and for finishing off his passes with points.
"You get a lot more assists when you're knocking down shots. We just moved the ball a lot more," Lawson said. "We watched the second half of the game and overtime of the Maryland game and (Williams) showed us the bad shots we took."
Hansbrough and Danny Green were the recipients of the majority of Lawson's and the rest of UNC's passes, scoring 28 and 23 points, respectively. Hansbrough added 10 rebounds and was able to keep Gani Lawal, the ACC's leading rebounder, from making much of an impact on the boards. Lawal snared just four rebounds, and UNC out-rebounded the Yellow Jackets 45-31.
Hansbrough also reached a milestone in the game, setting the NCAA mark for made free throws in a career. He went eight-for-eight from the line and now holds the record with 907.
"Those are some great players up there, and for me to be at that top spot, it's an honor," Hansbrough said. "But also it's a lot of hard work. There's a lot of fouls involved."
UNC's bench also provided a spark with 29 points, and Zeller scored eight points to record his best offensive output since he returned from injury.
Of course, every UNC deficiency displayed in the Maryland game wasn't completely remedied in just one week of practice. Williams was displeased at the Tar Heels' defense in the opening ten minutes of the game, and UNC allowed 13 second chance points off of offensive rebounds in the second half.
"Some things that we wanted to do today that we didn't do; we wanted to get better at finishing the defense," Green said. "We played better defense, of course, than last game, but we didn't do a good job of finishing it like we wanted to and boxing out and limiting them to one bad shot."
But even though he thought the defense still needed some work, Green said it was important that UNC got back to the basics and returned to the unselfishness on offense that make the Tar Heels a nightmare to defend.
"We're just focusing on getting stronger as a team and making sure our chemistry is there at the right time," he said. "I feel like if we do the little things, everything else will take care of itself."
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