COLUMBUS, Ohio — The way Roy Williams would have you hear it, there’s nothing he hates more in life than someone trying to “be cool.”
And that’s exactly what he thought his team was doing in the first half on Friday night. So when he entered the locker room of Nationwide Arena during the intermission to address his players, he made his message clear. Not by yelling, or scolding, or panicking, but by coaching, as senior guard Kenny Williams noted after the game.
Whatever Roy Williams did, or said, it worked for his team. After an underwhelming 20 minutes of play, the No. 1 seed North Carolina men’s basketball team came roaring back to life in the second half on the way to an 88-73 win over No. 16 seed Iona in the first round of the 2019 NCAA Tournament.
“Needless to say the second half was a lot different from the first half,” Williams said. “I thought the first half we were very tentative on the offensive end, and didn’t do what we planned to do on the defensive end.”
Not only was UNC (28-6) a different team in the first half, but it was a bad one at that. The Tar Heels struggled on both ends of the court on their way to a 38-33 deficit and justthree first-half assists, a number that made graduate guard Cameron Johnson wince after the win.
“Only three? Ouch,” Johnson said.
Yet the group that came out in the second half was no longer playing cool. It was no longer settling for shots around the 3-point line, or allowing its opponent to get open looks from beyond the arc. UNC began moving the ball around and playing inside, resulting in 30 points in the paint in the final 20 minutes, compared to just 18 in the first half.
“When we step on the court as a group, we say, ‘Let’s get the ball inside, work inside-out,’” Johnson said. “Easier to shoot that way, easier to attack the paint that way. We were just swinging it around too much and firing shots, and we kind of changed that.”
In the first half that wasn’t the case. But even more so, UNC was failing to show effort, and Kenny Williams agreed with his coach’s sentiment that the team was not quite playing to its full potential.
