Point play propels Pack, Heels
Feb 19, 2009
If anyone understands, it’s Sidney Lowe. One of the most adept point guards in ACC history, Lowe holds the league’s career mark, kept since 1980, for highest ratio of assists to turnovers, reflecting a superior combination of skill, control, and judgment.
These days Lowe, whose ACC career ended in 1983 with an NCAA championship, is busily recalibrating the N.C. State program for which he played. The past two years the coach has tried to win without a front-rank point guard. After shuffling through his options, he returned recently to Javi Gonzalez, the lightly-recruited playmaker who grew up in Carolina, Puerto Rico, before attending high school in Miami.
The lineup shift helped to produce impressive results for the Wolfpack – an overtime loss at Virginia Tech, consecutive wins against Wake Forest and Georgia Tech, and a respectable showing at North Carolina on Wednesday night in an 89-80 defeat. N.C. State is now 14-10, 4-7 in the conference.
The game at the Smith Center turned with a 16-2 Tar Heel explosion that began around the midpoint of the second half, allowing the home team to cruise to its 24th victory in 26 games. There were plenty of interesting sidelights, from striking individual performances to UNC coach Roy Williams’ comments during his post-game press conference, when he let slip a raw expletive in describing the inadequacy of his team’s “stinking” pressure defense.
Williams later apologized. Told his coach had strayed publicly from the bounds of polite discourse, senior Tyler Hansbrough looked genuinely shocked. “Whew,” he said. “Oh, man. Well, ah, I’ve definitely heard it more than you guys. It’s usually once every other ballgame, I would say he drops it in the huddle. We know he means business when he says that.”
Hansbrough of course always means business. Besides his 27 points and 7 rebounds, he made 7 of 7 free throws, overtaking Pete Maravich, the late LSU scoring maven. Hansbrough now ranks second in NCAA career free throws made, behind only Wake Forest’s Dickie Hemric.
Hansbrough also responded to critics of his single-minded offensive approach with his usual unspoken eloquence, tying a personal best with four assists. That gave him seven over the past two games after recording 14 assists in the team’s previous 24 outings.
The Heels also got a welcome boost to their depth with the return of 7-foot freshman Tyler Zeller, a refreshingly unguarded youngster who missed 13 weeks due to a broken wrist. Zeller admitted butterflies at the outset and displayed rust throughout in eight minutes of action.
For its part, N.C. State held North Carolina under 40 points in the first half, one of only four times that happened this season. The Wolfpack made 54.1 percent of its shots, best against UNC in 2008-09, including 64.3 percent in the second period, another high for a Tar Heel opponent.
That offensive efficiency was due in no small measure to the leadership of Gonzalez, who matched his career best in 3-pointers made (4 of 4) and fell one point shy of his career scoring high (19). “He definitely had an excellent first half, and I thought he played well for us throughout the entire game,” Lowe said. The sophomore also had 3 assists and 5 turnovers in 25 minutes.
But Lowe, who has a habit of emphasizing rhetorical points by repeating entire sentences, reserved his most effusive praise for Ty Lawson, the ACC leader in assists and assist-turnover ratio. The UNC junior had 17 points on a variety of jumpers and layups against the Pack, along with 2 rebounds, 2 steals, and 9 assists compared to a single turnover. With him running the show, the Heels committed one turnover in the second half.
Lowe particularly lauded Lawson’s ballhawking, a tone-setter for Carolina’s defense. “He’s strong enough, he’s quick enough, he’s smart enough on the ball that really nobody’s going to go by him,” the N.C. State coach said. “He’s just a heck of a ballplayer. He’s a heck of a player. I think he’s the guy that makes them go, and he makes plays inside, outside, draw and kick. He runs their show. I think he’s proven himself. I like the way he plays the game.”
Lawson’s leadership could take the Heels where point guards Jimmy Black, Derrick Phelps, and Raymond Felton took them previously – to the game’s pinnacle. Yet he almost did not return to Chapel Hill this season to make that run. He, along with Wayne Ellington and Danny Green, flirted last spring with the possibility of jumping to the pros.
Then in June Lawson was arrested for underage drinking and driving. “After that, I probably decided to come back because I wasn’t mature enough,” he said earlier this month.
Williams believed the guard would have departed except for that lapse in judgment. “People want me to suspend him for 88 days for his little fiasco last spring,” the coach confided on the eve of the '09 season. “It cost him two and a half or three million dollars. I would think that’s pretty good punishment already.”
Lawson is understandably hesitant to dwell on his arrest, a guilty plea, and a sentence to perform community service and satisfy other first-offender punishments. He does acknowledge sympathy for a more celebrated athlete, swimmer Michael Phelps, who was caught on camera smoking marijuana.
“Everybody makes mistakes,” Lawson said. “We’re both young. He made a mistake. He said he was sorry for it. I think everybody should let it go.”
Lawson has moved on, without going anywhere. Now he and the Heels are prominent candidates to win the national championship. Meanwhile, besides challenging Lowe’s career mark for ballhandling efficiency, Lawson is at the forefront of the race for ACC Player of the Year. Amazingly, considering the importance of the position, he could become the league’s first pure point guard to win the award since 1978, when Phil Ford plied the court for North Carolina.
