This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > March > 27
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Tar Heels looking unstoppable, unbeatable
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Charlotte — This is getting out of hand. Just when everybody figured the only way to halt rampaging North Carolina was to slow the pace and clamp down on Tyler Hansbrough, the infernal Heels showed the basketball world they can win big at any speed, can win big even on a night when Psycho T began as if on lithium.
So now the watching world is wondering: Is there any way to beat these guys? Because if there is, nobody’s found it since before Valentine’s Day. And nobody’s come close in the Big Dance, through which the top-seeded Heels have whirled their way halfway to a national championship.
They beat Mount St. Mary’s in Round 1 by 39 points, and maybe you thought, “OK, that’s the play-in winner. Let’s see what they do against a spry team from a power conference.” Then they beat Arkansas by 31, and maybe you thought, “Well, Arkansas was the only team that lost twice to Georgia. Let’s see what they do against an opponent that’s famously hard to play.”
Here’s what the Heels did: They beat Washington State, a team that hadn’t been beaten by more that 10 points all season, by 21. They turned what seemed, at least on paper, an intriguing contrast in styles into just another Baby Blue blowout.
They won a night when the nation’s best player — Hansbrough, the indefatigable Psycho T — was their fifth-leading scorer in the first half. He missed his first four shots, missed his first two free throws and lost the ball three times in the first seven minutes. And still Carolina led by 14 at the half. (And still Hansbrough, who had two points in the first 20 minutes, finished with 18.)
What figured to be a waltz with barbed wire turned into something so breezy that coach Roy Williams could open his postgame briefing with a little joke. “I always thought the media had power, but I just found out that Tyler is one of our five guys selected for drug testing [standard NCAA tournament procedure], and they told him he had to talk to the media before he uses the bathroom. That’s power!”
Then this: “Other than that, we’re ecstatic.”
It might be time to stop looking for flaws in these Heels. Carolina’s 2005 NCAA championship team sometimes won in spite of itself: Rashad McCants would fly off on tangents, and the whole bunch sometimes neglected to play defense, even as late as in the Syracuse Regional final against plodding Wisconsin, which scored 82 points against the laissez-faire Heels.
This team is slightly less talented but far more focused. There have been defensive lapses — Boston College’s Tyrese Rice scored 46 points against the Heels, 34 in the first half — but none recently. They limited Washington State to 31.6 percent shooting, and nobody’s going to beat Carolina shooting 31.6 percent. It might be that nobody’s going to beat Carolina, period.
Asked if, in its cold-blooded way, beating Washington State by 21 was more impressive than trashing Arkansas, guard Ty Lawson said: “I think so. It was a tough-type game, a grind-it-out game.”
And now we know the Heels can bump and grind as well as rip and run. Said Williams: “We put on the board before the game that we had to be tough enough, patient enough and poised enough.”
His team went 3-for-3, and what happened here Thursday had to be chilling for the rest of the remaining NCAA field. If you can’t come close to Carolina on a night when Hansbrough does next to nothing for a whole half, when might you?
“I like to win games in the 80’s and 90’s and the 100’s,” Williams said. “But sometimes you’ve got to be tough enough to win them in the 60’s and 70’s.”
So now the prettiest team in the land has proved it can mud-wrestle as well. What’s next for these resourceful Heels? Running the Princeton offense better than Princeton? Pressing more ferociously than Tennessee? Getting more officiating breaks than UCLA?
Permalink | Comments (15) | Post your comment | Categories: Tech/ACC, UGA/SEC
Hawks are better, still not good
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Good news: Mike Bibby has made the Hawks better.
Bad news: He hasn’t made them good.
The Hawks are 10-12 with Bibby (and that’s giving him credit for the resumed “game” against Miami, which they finally won without technically scoring a point during those 51.9 seconds). Of those 10 victories, only three have come against teams with winning records.
The Hawks will almost certainly make the playoffs because their remaining schedule - six of their final 11 games are against losing teams - is soft and nobody below them in the East seems capable of bolting upward. But what then?
They’re locked in as the No. 8 seed, which means they’d play Boston, which means they’d lose in five games if not four. They’d lose not because their starting five can’t compete - with Bibby, their starters are quite good - but because they have little else.
The hidden cost of the Bibby trade was that it defoliated a bench that wasn’t lush to begin with. None of the guys they shipped to Sacramento - Tyronn Lue, Anthony Johnson, Shelden Williams, Lorenzen Wright - are all that great, but at least they were bodies. Now the Hawks’ bench essentially begins and ends with Josh Childress. In the loss at Chicago on Tuesday, every starter worked at least 32 minutes, and Bibby and Joe Johnson worked more than 40.
The Bibby trade was the right move because it gave the Hawks - sorry to bring this up for the 1,000th time - a real point guard and jump-started a team that mightn’t have made the playoffs otherwise, but will simply making the playoffs in the uninspiring East be enough? Enough for this city to get energized over the prospects of a first-round loss? Enough to change our longstanding perception of this flailing franchise?
We have only to look toward the Hawks’ brothers-in-Spirit for the answers. The Thrashers made the playoffs last season after being propped up by a flurry of deadline moves - they even won their division - but were swept by the Rangers in Round 1. Now they’re without a coach and without Marian Hossa and they hold the 28th-best record in a 30-team league.
It seemed like a big deal at the time, the Thrashers finally qualifying for the postseason. In hindsight it seems rather less. Unless something changes with the Hawks - unless, say, Salim Stoudamire turns into Vinnie Johnson and Solomon Jones into John Salley - the same will happen with them. They’ll get in and be gone in the wink of an eye, and we’ll ask ourselves, not for the first time, “Is that all there is?”
Permalink | Comments (36) | Post your comment | Categories: Hawks/NBA
