Visiting Penn not mightier than horde
Nov 15, 2008
North Carolina’s resort to its impressive bench in a season-opening basketball win on Saturday proved conclusively, at least in this case, that Penn was not mightier than the horde.
Top-ranked UNC dipped into a rich talent pool to excellent effect in a satisfying, if uneven, 86-71 win over its overmatched opponent from the Ivy League. Six members of the bigger, more athletic Tar Heel squad scored in double figures. There were 22 assists on 28 North Carolina baskets, impressive efficiency for any offense.
Freshman center Tyler Zeller paced the Heels with 18 points. Fellow freshman Ed Davis, a 6-10 forward whose initials spell out his first name, had a double-double in his collegiate debut. Ten of Davis’ rebounds came at the defensive end, a stat any coach would love. Zeller had no defensive rebounds, a deficiency duly noted by Roy Williams. “You know, still, it’s the first game,” the Carolina coach said. “We’re not going to be perfect.”
While the overall result against the Quakers was predictable, the terms of engagement were a bit odd on a variable and unseasonably warm Saturday that began with a moment of silence at the Smith Center for tornado victims in eastern North Carolina.
Few observers expected all five starters from UNC’s 2008 Final Four squad to take the court to start the 2008-09 season. Yet the three members of that group who flirted with leaving early for the pros -- Wayne Ellington, Danny Green, and Ty Lawson -- were in the starting lineup to face Pennsylvania. Instead it was Marcus Ginyard and Tyler Hansbrough, the pair most intent on sticking around, who were not in uniform. Injured, both sat on the bench in suits along with reserve Mike Copeland, another senior.
Classmate Bobby Frasor, playing his first game since blowing out his left knee last December, said there clearly was something missing in the days preceding the opener. “Guys don’t seem to have that life that Marcus and Tyler bring to practice,” said Frasor, who pronounced himself fit as he iced his knee and ankle. “I think when those two are back in practice, it’s going to be a wholly different team, a wholly different atmosphere and I think it’s going to make everyone better.”
Frasor is, by all accounts, Hansbrough’s closest friend on the team. When the pair took a much-publicized leap from a Chapel Hill balcony into a swimming pool last spring, the National and ACC Player of the Year good-naturedly blamed Frasor, according to Williams. “’Coach, it wasn’t my fault, it was Bobby’s fault,’” Williams recalled being told by Hansbrough. “’I said I’d do it if Bobby would do it. I knew Bobby would be chicken. And then I turn around and Bobby’s jumping in.’ And he says, ‘Then I had to do it.’”
But this time Hansbrough did not jump in with Frasor, who came off the bench before the first TV timeout and wound up playing 21 minutes against Penn. Hansbrough’s housemate said he remained “confident” the big man, resting a shin haunted by a “stress reaction,” would be back soon, “as soon as he can.” In fact, Frasor said of his fiercely competitive friend, “If there was no one, Coach, to tell him, he would have played today.”
Improbable as it may seem in such a devout basketball outpost, even had Hansbrough chosen this afternoon to launch his quest to become the first repeat National Player of the Year since Virginia’s Ralph Sampson more than a quarter-century ago, he might have been upstaged by a most unlikely drama.
Many Tar Heel fans were riveted by proceedings in College Park, where the UNC football team faced Maryland in a contest critical to its postseason fortunes. When the basketball game ended, the 19,623 fans in attendance were invited to remain to watch the football Heels on the Dean Dome’s prodigious overhead video monitors. So many complied, there was virtually no traffic leaving the parking lots until the final, fatal interception of a Cameron Sexton pass well after basketball’s final buzzer.
“It’s a lot different from the past. We’ve never had that before, where our football team was a focus on our campus like that, not since I’ve been here,” Green said matter-of-factly. As he spoke, a large flat screen TV mounted on the wall of the basketball players’ lounge showed the climactic moments of UNC’s loss at Maryland. “I think right now the football team, what they have going on right now is more important. They’re playing for first place and we’re just getting our season started.”
Green, the erstwhile sixth-man, started for only the second time in 108 games as a Tar Heel. Pressed into the lineup in Ginyard’s place, he played one of his most complete games yet. Green had 12 points, four rebounds, four assists, three steals and no turnovers. Twice his bounce passes in traffic hit Zeller, a remarkably fleet and fluid seven-footer, in full stride en route to emphatic scores. “I’m not really a bounce pass type of guy,” Green admitted.
But, as Williams preaches, sometimes a chest pass just won’t do. Learning such nuances will be a constant challenge for the three freshmen likely to see action this season, the third being playmaker Larry Drew II, shaky in his debut.
Williams observed that his young big men had not previously needed to guard anyone more than six feet from the basket, a task that repeatedly confronted them against Penn’s cutting, passing, high-low motion offense. “It’s definitely something we have to work on,” Zeller said.
The meeting between the powers from the Ivy League and ACC was the third in three years, all UNC victories. The Quakers may be overmatched against top teams, but they are accustomed to such competition. Their program has become an NCAA habitué, with 23 appearances, more than any ACC programs except North Carolina (40) and Duke (32).
So it was that Glen Miller, in his third year orchestrating the Penn program, spoke highly of the Heels, even without their best player. “I don’t want to downplay the importance of Hansbrough,” Miller said. “Obviously they’re going to be a better team with Hansbrough. He’s a terrific, terrific player…(but) they’re a very, very good basketball team now.”
