Well, I was close - but the game wasn't

Where to begin in talking about last night's 18-point beat down of the right-wing boobs/devils from Durham?  

So many things to talk about, from Tyler Zeller's double double and dominance, to the important bench play of James Michael McAdoo, PJ Hairston and Justin Watts (great D when Bullock got into foul trouble), to Harrison Barnes' confident shooting and dagger late, to John Henson's second-half play on offense and a key stop late on D, to Reggie Bullock doing a little bit of everything, and finally to Kendall Marshall being Kendall Marshall+ controlling a game's tempo and hitting big shots. 

But I'll start here, with my pre-blog.  

We knew Carolina had to do three things to win last night - go to Zeller, rebound and go over screens on defense.  To say they succeeded on all of those endeavors is to state the obvious and make an understatement.

Led by 'In Z We Trust," the Heels dominated the boards. And it was pure dominance, as Carolina was quicker to the ball all night. It was not Duke choosing to concede the glass and send 4 guys back on D to stop Carolina's transition, it was a desire to win that part of the battle - and the Heels did.  

And as any Tar Heel born, Tar Heel bred, waiting to be Tar Heel dead fan knows, rebounding leads to transition baskets. Carolina's board work and transition game is what lead to that awe-inspiring 24-point halftime lead.

The other key was our defense on the three-pointer. As it has been in North Carolina's 5 other recent wins in Cameron, the Heels went over ball screens and forced Duke to step inside the three-point line all night. Reggie Bullock in particular was fantastic - again an understatement - on defense. He is so smart, and big, and good, I can't stop gushing about this guy.

How much gushing?  I told my brother after the game that Bullock's play reminds me of George Lynch. 

That's right, I went there - George Lynch.  Yes, Bullock has been THAT good.

But the key to beating the devils is to take away the three, and with this team to stop Austin Rivers, and led by Bullock the Heels did that for a full 40 minutes last night.  

To recap, the pre-game blog stressed: Zeller, rebounding and going over screens - and I predicted a final score of Carolina 86, devils 73.  Close enough, and happily not a close score as the Heels blew out the devils in Cameron, again, for another ACC regular season championship. 

• I've blogged it before, I'll blog it again: there is nothing like beating Duke in Cameron. For me, the worst thing about Duke is not Krzyzewski or their players (usually not their players, since this IS the alma mater of Christian Laetnner, J.J. Reddick, etc.) or anything basketball related; after all, you have to respect a team that plays hard, wins, graduates their players, etc. But the Duke student body - right now training the next Rand Paul or Richard Nixon! - is another matter. It's simply great to puncture their sense of boorish and arrogant entitlement for one night.
• I was surprised to read Tarheelblue.com's Adam Lucas' column this morning that kind of wondered if Carolina had the stomach to come back from last month's tragic loss to Duke in the Dean Dome. Did anyone really question that? I didn't. Isn't Roy Williams our coach? Isn't he a protege of Dean Smith?  Enough said. Plus, isn't Kendall Marshall our point guard, Tyler Zeller our anchor? Coming back - and keeping losses in perspective - is as Carolina blue as rebounding, transition baskets, and pointing at the passer.
• If I ever suffer a serious medical condition - a heart attack, get into a car accident, etc. - please DO NOT call 911, please call Kendall Marshall instead. That guy is phenomenal. He was a maestro last night, and his offensive game continues to get more confident and more important. There is nothing that Marshall can not do.
• Another key was James Michael McAdoo. Early in the season I blogged on his importance as our only real big off the bench. With Z in some foul trouble last night McAdoo was huge, and his two Johnny on the spot plays, the Blake Griffin-esque dunk and the tip in late -were huger than huge.
• Finally, if I'm a Duke senior the last name I want to see on Carolina's roster is Tyler or Ty.  It's official name is Cameron Indoor Stadium, but our pals Hansbrough, Lawson and Zeller have unofficially dubbed that place Ty(ler)'s House.

Anyway, what a great win.  

GO HEELS! 

ACC Doldrums

What's more depressing: losing the ACC-Big 10 challenge for the third year in a row; or the realization that Leonard Hamilton is the third longest tenured coach in the conference?

The ACC became the best conference in the country thanks - in part - to coaching giants such as Dean Smith, Everett Case, Norm Sloan, Lefty Dreisell, Gary Williams, Terry Holland, Bobby Cremins, Jim Valvano, Vic Bubas, Frank Maguire, Bones McKinney, etc. etc.

Now we have ol' Roy and Mike Krzyzewski . . . and that's it.  Leonard Hamilton is not only the third longest tenured coach, but a guy who has no earthly idea how to coach offense is arguably the third best coach in the ACC by virtue of going to three straight NCAA tournaments. 

That's how far the ACC has fallen. 

And it's not only Hamilton.  I think Tony Bennett is the fourth longest tenured, and he hasn't been in Charlottesville long enough to have a Virginia drivers license yet.

Things may improve.  After all, Jamie Dixon and Jim Boeheim are coming, and only one of them had to fire an alleged child molester this season.  And Mark Turgeon at Maryland is a Roy Williams disciple, Mark Gottfried may be able to jump start things at NC State, and the new coaches at Clemson and Georgia Tech have won at lesser schools.  

The football-powered expansion is one reason ACC basketball has suffered. But the main culprit is a lackluster series of head coaches on the bench of storied programs in Raleigh and Atlanta.

Another one bites the dust

I've often used this space to opine that Mike Krzyzewski is NOT a great Xs and Os coach.  He certainly in an excellent recruiter and motivator.  But Duke usually succeeds due to effort and attitude, not necessarily skills and sets.  In fact, their offensive stats are pretty simple.  

Krzyzewski gets his players to play extremely hard and extremely smart, especially on defense. 

But his players often struggle once they leave Durham.  Without Krzyzewski in their ears and in their heads they don't have the skills to fall back on to succeed in the NBA.  The  most successful Duke professional of the K era, Carlos Boozer, had to reinvent himself in the League.  At Duke, he was a back to the basket center; in the NBA he is a face-up smallish forward who has turned into an all star.

The lack of success of the players is also true with ex-assistant coaches.  With the firing of Fayetteville native Jeff Capel, the Coach K coaching tree looks bad.  First Tommy Amaker crashed and burned at two schools in big-time conferences (Seton Hall and Michigan) before finding moderate success at a non-big time conference at Harvard. Quinn Snyder lost AND was embroiled in a recruiting controversy at Missouri.  And now Capel, who only won when Blake Griffin was on campus. 

Johnny Dawkins, losing his way through the Pac 17 at Stanford, is just killing time waiting to join the unemployment line outside of Krzyzewski's office.

All these guys were hired by ADs who assumed they could transfer Duke's style to their campuses.  But you can't duplicate K's motivational skills or emotional work.  And with not many X and O tricks to fall back on, coaches like Amaker, Snyder, Capel and Dawkins fail.  

The 'Carlos Boozer of coaches' is Notre Dame's Mike Bray, who unlike the other Duke coaching alums did NOT play at Duke.  Maybe there is some there there on the sidelines, but ex-players fail to notice it among the shouting, cursing and motivating coming from Coach K.

Good riddance to 2010

You know a year that saw the Tar Heels go 5 and 11 in the ACC and end up in the NIT, and saw John Boehner become Speaker of the House, really stunk.  Personally, it was a decent-to-good year for me, but outside of family stuff I thought the last year really, really stunk.

Way too much of my mood hinges on the Tar Heels. I don't want to rehash the problems of the 2010 season, but the worst thing was watching Carolina not look like Carolina.  Looking like Carolina - the Carolina way - matters.  And when the Carolina way is not done right, not only do fans like me suffer but so does the nation.  Or at least the karma suffers.

As I've said before, can it really be a coincidence that John Boehner passes Pelosi, and Krzyzewski passes Dean, in the same year? It's not: when Carolina does well, good triumphs over evil.  Simple as that.

Want more proof?  In 2010, Duke wins a national championship, and not a month later BP causes the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.  

In 2009, Carolina wins a national championship and Congress passes a bill to protect more than 2 million acres of new public lands a wilderness and national parks in the same month. Again, not a coincidence.

The saddest part of Pelosi no longer being speaker, the worst thing to happen to the United States since Bush's reelection, is that when you look back at 2010 a lot actually got done.

• Passing financial reform legislation was huge.
• As was passing a health care bill that will start to reduce the cost of health care, allow children to stay on their parents health plans until 26 and prohibit turning down someone due to a preexisting condition.  It might not have been a national champion of bills, but it is final four worthy.  
• Covering the cost of health insurance for 9/11 first responders was almost as big.
• And repealing 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' was even more huge. 
• And in what other year would getting most U.S. troops, including all combat troops, out of Iraq become a small story, one barely mentioned?

Reciting this list of legislative accomplishments underscores two points.  One, it shows how all those accomplishments are window dressing in the face of high unemployment and general economic anxiety.  And two, how little people pay attention. I honestly think people don't know how much the last Congress did.  Then again, maybe they do but economic anxiety undercuts that knowledge.  Feel and emotion will always triumph over a laundry list.

Or people may simply be crazy and stupid, at least the ones who voted this year.

Anyway, good riddance to 2010, the year of Duke, oil spills, John Boehner, and a electorate driven to stupidity by a bad economy.

The good news is, the Heels will get better.  The bad news, don't expect another long list of accomplishments in the next year.  After all, Democrats still control the Senate and of course the Presidency, so don't expect legislative harmony or many big bills to pass this year.  And even if the House Republicans do scare enough Democrats in the Senate to overturn some of Obama's accomplishments you can guarantee the President will veto them.

A few more notes:

• I forgot the two words that best sum up 2010 for me: Rand Paul.  Duke and stupidity in one package!
• The bad karma extended to the Carolina football team, a team that was supposed to challenge for an ACC championship behind a stout and experienced defense.  Instead, we saw most of the stars from that unit get suspended for improper contact with agents.  Other players were involved in a still unresolved academic scandal.  More than a dozen players were suspended, yet the team still had a decent season thanks to stalwarts like T.J. Yates, Johnny White, Dante Paige-Moss and Quan Sturdivant. 
• Actually, the football Heels' problems had more to do with bad leadership and stewardship from Butch Davis, who embarrassed the university more than Matt Doherty ever did.  Time to get rid of him, time to Fire Butch Davis!
• It was a game against a 2-10 team, but I'm still heartened by the great shooting we saw from the Heels yesterday.  No matter the opponent, good shooting breeds confidence - and more good shooting.  Here's hoping the good shooting that has been on display the last month carries over into the ACC season.  

Billy Taylor

DC lost another great citizen yesterday when Billy Taylor died after 89 impressive years.  Taylor, a North Carolina native, moved to DC at a young age and became an important part of the Washington music scene. He studied music at Howard with the same instructor who taught Duke Ellington, and played with a Who's Who of jazz musicians: Frank Sinatra, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie among others, in a career that featured touring, making records, writing songs, hosting radio shows, working as a reporter for 'CBS Sunday Morning,' and educating his fellow citizens about the music he called "America's classical music" - a huge compliment to classical music in my opinion.


When I moved to DC in 1993 I was eager to take advantage of being a big and worldly city.  Within three months of moving here I had gone to a Redskins-Cowboys game at RFK, purchased a mini-season ticket package to the Bullets (seats behind the basket, row H or J, face value $28 a ticket, at the Cap Center one of the most minor league looking major league arenas in the US), and purchased season tickets to "Billy Taylor on Jazz" at the Kennedy Center.  


Four or five times a year, Taylor and his quartet would host a visiting musician, folks like Arturo Sandoval, Diane Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater, to play and discuss jazz music for an hour and a half.  The series was usually held in one of the Kennedy Center's smaller theaters, so it was very intimate show.  And there was also a question and answer session with the audience.  


Taylor was great - knowledgeable, charismatic, genuine and funny.  His band was great, too, and very versatile.  For a redneck from North Carolina who had moved to DC from Tallahassee, Florida I felt incredibly sophisticated attending each show.  Alison and I would make a night of it, meeting for dinner somewhere in Foggy Bottom then walking to the Kennedy Center for the program.  It was a great introduction to DC, let alone a great way to learn more about one of the greatest art forms ever invented.


Tough year for DC losing two folks, Taylor and Abe Pollin, who made Washington a great place to live.


Other DC News

• Evan and I went to our first Wizards game of the season last night, mainly to see Tyler Hansbrough.  It turned out to be an enjoyable night as the Zards won a game, and Hansbrough played 21 minutes.  We picked up two tickets on the street from one of the nicest scalpers I have ever met ($100 for two tickets, whose face value was $135 each, at half court in the club section), ran into quite a few Tar Heels on the street and at the Green Turtle, and saw Washington make shots on their way to a 14-point win.  
• John Wall looked pretty good, at least with the ball in his hands.  He is not a great shooter and the Pacers were giving him jump shots all night. On defense, he was very passive, too.  But when the Wizards were running he was pretty compelling to watch.  Though he is only 20 this is clearly Wall's team.
• And it should be; he's clearly their best player.  A team like the Wiz are going to struggle no matter what; Nick Young is now the longest tenured Washington player.  The Post reported this morning that the team is shopping Andray Blatche, which is great news; that guy has some skills but absolutely no desire/drive/work ethic/smarts/savvy/whatever. Blatche is an athletic guy who thinks athleticism alone is enough when in reality it's only about 10 percent of the equation (for instance, uber-talented athletes like Jordan or Kobe owe 90 percent of their success to will and drive and hard work - and maybe Phil Jackson - not their physical gifts).  Any trade for Blatche would be a good one, but I hope the Zards can pick up a blue collar rebounder - the next Wes Unseld? - who can board and start a fast break with a great outlet pass to Wall.
• One last Wall note: the PA announcer last night repeatedly called him "Jimmy Wall."  When did that start?
• Hansbrough got some minutes last night, and finished with 7 points and 7 boards, plus 2 blocked shots in 21 minutes.  It's funny to see how small he looks, not just shorter but skinnier.  Injuries and illness have kept Psycho T's NBA career from picking up any momentum, but you did see flashes of the UNC-era Hansbrough, especially on the boards, last night.  The hustle and effort was there. 
• But on offense the Pacer's use their power forwards to set a lot of screens, and Hansbrough on the high post as a passer. It must be a huge adjustment for Tyler to be a facilitator instead of the instigator of the the offense.  But he did get open down low a few times, but three times had shots blocked,  Instead of going up strong Hansbrough tried a series of pump fakes to get open looks.  The explosiveness is not there, which I imagine is a by product of missing so much time the last two seasons to injury.  That will likely improve with time.  I am surprised, however, that Hansbrough has not taken many outside shots this season.  At Carolina he became a credible threat from 17-19 feet (and 22 feet in Cameron) but in the NBA he is still a banger.
• It may be too early to tell, but Indiana does not seem to be a good fit for him. Maybe coach Jim O'Brien wants Hansbrough to stay down low; that team has some shooters including Danny Granger, on the roster. O'Brien has not given Hansbrough steady minutes at the four spot, and Tyler did not look that energetic before the game or when he came out.  Granted, I was in the mezzanine section, but Psycho T didn't seem that psyched from where we sat.

That's enough for now.  Look for my look back at a terrible 2010, which will include my thoughts on Krzyzewski passing Dean (in the same year John Boehner took Nancy Pelosi's job; not a karmic coincidence), soon.

Quick Take on the Sunday Post

Back in DC, and reading the Post on newsprint as opposed to on line (but as it was on the Outer Banks, I'm still not wearing a shirt; I offer that up as a warning to my coworkers and fellow Metro riders for Monday).

After an hour of reading the paper, here are three quick takes on the news:

• The lead article in the Post is on another infamous Alaskan plane crash that killed Reps. Begich and Boggs in 1972.  The article also references the 1978 plane crash that killed Sen. Ted Stevens' first wife.  I bring that up only to point out how odd - and ideological - Sen. Stevens was.  In December 2005, when he failed to successfully include Arctic Refuge drilling language in a defense appropriations bill (he was chair of that committee at the time), he called the day he lost that vote "the saddest day of my life." Really, sadder than the day your wife died in a plane crash?
• Dan Balz's column points out how Ds hope to weather voter dissatisfaction in the November midterm elections by pointing out how crazy the Rs are. Of course, the only agenda the Republican have is to repeat how mad they are; they do not have an agenda or a single idea on how to end the two wars Bush got us in, fix the economy, put people to work, or protect the planet. 

Pointing out how nutty folks like Dookie Rand Paul are is certainly a valid point.  But it also is a depressing statement about the American electorate.  Obama ran and won - in part - on being aspirational and solution oriented on health care, the economy, financial reform, clean energy, etc. Then again, he mainly won because the electorate was fed up with George Bush. Is the political shelf life of being optimistic and aspirational a mere two years in contemporary America?  Are we that cranky and distracted and immature, that we are only happy complaining about things rather than trying to implement difficult solutions to serious problems like energy and health care?  Seems like it.

• Finally, I close with two mundane items from sports.  One, FIFA is thinking about eliminating ties in World Cup matches.  But football should not stop there.  Ties should be banned from all football/soccer matches.  One of the frustrating things about soccer is that not every team in every game plays to win, and you gain a point for not winning.  Think about how stupid that phrase is: in some games in certain scenarios one of the teams is NOT playing to win. If you are not playing to win you should not be playing.  Banning ties would also get rid of the stupid point system employed by soccer; it should come down to wins and losses.  One important way to dramatically improve soccer is to ban ties from every league and tournament. 

And two, the right-wingers in charge of the USA Basketball, Jerry Colangelo and Mike Krzyzewski, are not picking any Tar Heels for this year's team set to play in the 2010 World Basketball championships in Turkey at the end of this month. But that's not all.  Colangelo had famously stated that anyone who does NOT play for the national team in 2010 will NOT be eligible for the 2012 Olympic team.  Predictably, Colangelo has backed off on that statement, in effect throwing the players who are playing in Turkey for the U.S. under the bus: 'thanks for playing in 2010, but sunshine patriots like LeBron and Wade are here for the Olympics so we don't need you any more.'  More right-wing hypocrisy.  As it was in 2006, this is not my America, so I will likely root for Greece if they play us in Turkey.