WRAL Sports Fan

North Carolina

Carolina gets its swagger back in 82-65 win over Miami

By David Reynolds

Jan 18, 2009

As Wayne Ellington drained his seventh straight second-half three-pointer to push North Carolina’s lead to 19 and deflate Miami’s hopes, it was plain for anyone witnessing Saturday night’s trouncing to see.

The swagger was back. UNC finally looked like UNC again.

After a week of panic for Tar Heel nation after its team’s disappointing 0-2 start to ACC play, North Carolina evened its conference record to 2-2 and its stars made the plays that seemed to be missing in those early-season defeats.

In the case of Ellington’s second-half scoring tear (all 23 of his points came after intermission), the junior shooting guard made plays that have been missing all season. Even when UNC remained undefeated, critics in both the media and the court of public opinion pointed to his decline in scoring and his significant drop in shooting percentage as a problem.

But at least for one half, the third-year player looked like his old self.

“It was fun to see that youngster have some success; it’s been tough on him,” coach Roy Williams said. “Nobody has been wanting to make shots more than he has. He’s worked at it, he’s kept a wonderful attitude and he’s done things to try to help out in other ways.”

But he was far from the only Tar Heel to remind people of how UNC looked before the Boston College game.

With Oklahoma’s Blake Griffin becoming this year’s National Player of the Year frontrunner and Wake Forest’s Jeff Teague grabbing headlines in the ACC, Tyler Hansbrough has become more under the radar than he has been in a long time.

But UNC’s all-time leading scorer thrust himself back into those conversations with a huge first half to carry his team to a four point halftime lead. All in all, he poured in 20 before intermission on his way to 24 for the game.

“Every time he touched it was either a bucket or a foul,” Ellington said. “We just wanted to continue to give him the ball and ride his back.”

But for all of Ellington’s and Hansbrough’s brilliance, Williams said his team came out flat in the first half (UNC fell behind by nine at one point), and that one of the biggest keys of the game was a player who figured out how to push the Tar Heels to another level by his defense.

It wasn’t Danny Green, whose two blocks of fast-break layups that sent the Smith Center crowd into a frenzy certainly seemed to fit the bill. Instead, Williams credited Ty Lawson, last seen getting torched by Teague and Boston College’s Tyrese Rice.

“It really started when Ty started getting more pressure on the ball,” Williams said. ”We got two or three steals out at midcourt that we converted into baskets, and on one of them he was diving on the floor.”

The point at which Williams said Lawson picked up his defensive intensity occurred during the last five minutes of the first half – UNC trailed by seven at the time. The Hurricanes didn’t score the rest of the half, and the Tar Heels seized a lead they would never relinquish.

The defense trickled down to Lawson’s offensive performance. He picked up eight assists from that point forward and helped put things back to normal. The Tar Heels have a winning streak again, even if it is only at a modest two.

Of course, talk of the Wake Forest and Boston College losses won’t be completely put to bed with only one victory and one performance in which UNC’s top players put it all together.

But Saturday’s victory against Miami shouldn’t be dismissed the way the Virginia game was. While the Cavaliers are likely will be bottom dwellers in the conference, the Hurricanes were on the fringes of the top 25 and are projected to be playing in March. And 2-2 in the ACC has feel way better than 1-3 to UNC fans.

UNC’s reacquainting itself with its old self – a team led by a talented group of upperclassmen that didn’t just win, but it dismantled its opponent in nearly every way.

“Coach talked about us making an extra effort, just hustling back on defense, doing the little things,” Green said. “Just getting back to being a hungry team.”