2007-08 North Carolina Tar Heels Basketball (San Antonio Here We Come)

[ligastar]

What a gutsy performance by the team. I mentioned in the first post of this thread that we had 3 PGs and this game illustrated this fact. With Lawson going down before the first TV timeout it was critical to have experienced PGs behind them. QT and Frasor didn't play lights out but they were able to keep the offense plugging along. The team only had 10 TOs in the game.

I thought Ginyard was the key player tonight. Roy put Ginyard on Tavernnari (#45 for B.Y.U.) in the 2nd half and his offense dried up. Green was huge with 3 steals and 14 points. Stepheson keeps on impressing with 9 boards, 2 assists and 0 TOs. He battled hard inside all night.

I managed to snag a 2nd row seat behind the basket opposite the UNC bench. I was riding Plaisted (#44 for B.Y.U.) the entire 2nd half. Whenever he came in the paint I yelled, "watch the elbows #44, quit fouling #44, I'm watching you." I did this the entire half. I'm like 20 feet from him so he hears me the entire time. With about 50 seconds left I'm yelling at him during a side out and he looks over at me with this wearied look on his face. I was half expecting to see my name in the box score for my efforts. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

I saw Eddie Murray (ex Baltimore Oriole) and Jerry Tarkanian during the game.

Here are some pictures I took. I would have much more but my battery died before the game.

<u>Here are the cocktail girls I was speaking about</u>



This excerpt is from the AP write up (note the Monroe impersonator was like 60 yrs old, lol, only in Vegas ... the girl in the middle had a crazy tramp stamp with a 4 leaf clover in the middle):

The fans got a splendid Sin City experience during the holiday weekend, complete with the Orleans' heavily tattooed arena waitresses and the Marilyn Monroe impersonator who sang the national anthem.

<u>Psycho T</u>



<u>Lawson warming up</u>



<u>Ellington tunes up the long range jumper</u>



<u>Frasor works on the jumper</u>



<u>The back of Dickie V's bald head</u>

[LurchySoprano]

Awesome pics ligastar. Jealous that you got to see the Heels in Vegas the lats two nights.

First off, I was really impressed by BYU. Plaisted is going to make some good money playing in the NBA as he has good speed, quickness and post moves. If he ever learns to get more aggressive with the ball and start to dunk it inside instead of laying it up he could be a really good NBA player.

Second of all, we have to address the post situation. Deon Thompson had zero rebounds in 20 minutes, which simply will not get it done. I'm not sure if we need to give him more time or if we should strongly consider starting Stepheson or Green, but something needs to be done with that. To be honest, I miss Deon when he weighed about 30 more pounds.

Danny Green and Ginyard are both playing so well and doing the many little things that it takes to win. I love the fact that we have two glue guys who contribute so many things to the team that don't show up in the stat sheets. Green has improved his decision making a lot this year IMO.

I've not been that impressed with us so far this year, but the fact that we are beating quality opponents while playing our C game is a good sign for the rest of the year. We beat a team that will be seeded somewhere between a 7-10 seed in the NCAA tournament without our starting PG pretty much.

[tarheeljks]

agreed lurchy. i think deon thompson should be benched until he learns to rebound/defend in the post, i would rather keep green coming off of the bench b/c he's a good spark.

[Aces McGee]

[ QUOTE ]
First off, I was really impressed by BYU. Plaisted is going to make some good money playing in the NBA as he has good speed, quickness and post moves. If he ever learns to get more aggressive with the ball and start to dunk it inside instead of laying it up he could be a really good NBA player.

[/ QUOTE ]

He holds the ball too long before he makes his move. And he shows too much of the ball when he faces up.

-McGee

[ligastar]

Basketball Prospectus article on Tar Heels' defense

[Aces McGee]

[ QUOTE ]
Basketball Prospectus article on Tar Heels' defense

[/ QUOTE ]

Are points-per-possession stats available anywhere on a game-by-game basis?

-McGee

[Pudge714]

liga,
I was going to post that [img]/images/graemlins/heart.gif[/img] basketball prospectus

[ligastar]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Basketball Prospectus article on Tar Heels' defense

[/ QUOTE ]

Are points-per-possession stats available anywhere on a game-by-game basis?

-McGee

[/ QUOTE ]

Not that I'm aware of. I just looked around on kenpom and didn't see it.

[tarheeljks]

sweet link liga, sending this to all of my duke/unc hating buddies.

[Aces McGee]

[ QUOTE ]
Basketball Prospectus article on Tar Heels' defense

[/ QUOTE ]

Sorry, all, I gotta come back to this, because it's been bugging me for a couple of years now.

(First, a disclaimer. Or, rather, two disclaimers. One, this post is probably going to be long. Two, I haven't followed any of the Ken Pom discussion on the message boards, so I may very well be making an argument that has been put forth and summarily dismissed. I apologize if that's the case, and Ebenhoe can ban me for rehashing an old argument if there's enough support for it).

While I recognize that SABRmetric-style stats -- like the ones popularized by Ken Pom and the one cited in that Basketball Prospectus article -- have more utility than traditional "per game" stats, it irritates me that they've seemingly taken the place of good old-fashioned observation.

The article asserts that Carolina played the best defense in the ACC last year and probably will again this year. I say "No way!" to both, and not because of any statistic. I don't need statistics to tell me that a team just down Tobacco Road from Chapel Hill is a much better defensive team than the Heels. (I don't use Duke as an example to patronize UNC fans, or because I'm a Blue Devils fan -- I'm not; rather, they're just a team that I've seen a few times this year that plays truly excellent defense).

I can see with my own eyes how Duke rotates on defense, how they defend ball screens extremely well, how their bigger guys like Kyle Singler take excellent angles when they are switched to smaller, quicker players, diverting guards away from the basket and into the teeth of the rest of the defense. It's similarly easy for me to see that these are all things that Carolina doesn't do well.

I don't want to focus too much on this season thus far, because the three times I've seen Carolina (vs. Davidson in
Charlotte, vs. BYU in Vegas, and at Ohio St. tonight in Columbus) they've basically been without Ty Lawson (once because of early foul trouble, twice due to an ankle injury that limited him to two minutes against BYU and kept him out tonight against the Buckeyes, who, incidentally, haven't been able to throw the ball in the ocean in their last two outings). The jury is still very much out on this year's team, although it appears that Roy Williams -- Carolina's notoriously offensive-minded coach -- would agree that his team's defense isn't yet adequate (SI article).

But let's go back to last year, and to something the Basketball Prospectus article touches on:

"As seen above, I think part of that is simply due to the way they look while they play. Another part, of course, is
the speed at which they play. Roy Williams' teams, whether in Chapel Hill or in Lawrence, have always played fast. It's tougher to spot a good defensive team that plays fast, just as it's tougher to spot a bad defensive team that goes slow."

The Tar Heels do, indeed, play fast. And against many opponents, that is all the defense they need. Having played a little basketball myself (admittedly at the low high school and AAU level) and watched quite a bit more, I am very familiar with the negative effect that playing fast has on team's that aren't used to it. Suddenly in a hurry, teams get caught up in the tempo of the game, rushing shots
and making poor passes.

Where this strategy falls short -- and where I believe Ken Pom's stats are ultimately deceiving because they don't seem to take this into account -- is when Carolina (or any team whose main defensive weapon is pace) comes up against an opponent that plays at that pace itself, or an opponent with solid, experienced guards, or an opponent that plays fast and has solid, experienced guards. In those cases, the opposition's ballhandlers don't rush their shots and don't make bad decisions, because they're comfortable with the pace of the game.

This would go a long way to explaining many of Carolina's losses last year to teams with lesser offensive talent: Maryland, thanks to their athletic bigs and inability to score in the halfcourt, preferred a fast-paced game last year; Virginia Tech, to whom North Carolina lost twice, boasted a poised and experienced backcourt in seniors Jamon Gordon and Zabian Dowdell (Let's remember that Illinois, a team widely considered to be very sound defensively but that played at a relatively slow pace last year, had Tech completely flummoxed in last year's NCAA Tournament before a late run gave the Hokies the narrow first-round victory); and Gonzaga, which beat Carolina at Madison Square Garden in last year's Preseason NIT semifinals, had a deep, experienced backcourt that liked to get up and down the court as much as the Heels did.

My point is not that Carolina's defense isn't good enough to win games -- a lot of games -- in the ACC. I'm not saying they're like VMI, whose defensive strategy is seemingly to allow the opposition to make a two in order to get the ball back to shoot a three. The Heels have now, always have had, and always will have the size and athleticism to get by without being sound defensively just by playing fast. It's enough to beat the Georgia Techs and Wake Forests and Florida States all winter long, and put up good defensive numbers in doing so.

My point is that not all teams are like Tech and Wake and FSU, and that Carolina struggled against certain kinds of teams last year and will probably continue to this year unless something changes. There are teams that are comfortable playing at that pace, and if I had to choose a team to go up against them, I'd rather take one that has defensive qualities which I can point to and say "That's what makes them a good defensive team." Whenever someone tries to tell me that Carolina is very good defensively, they show me statistics. Those statistics are not going to beat Memphis in March. Sound defense will, and I haven't seen it from Carolina.

-McGee