WRAL Sports Fan

North Carolina

Carolina crushes Georgia Tech, 104-74

By David Reynolds

Feb 28, 2009

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. 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."