Lucas: Desperate

By Adam Lucas

CHARLOTTE—Seven miles from here, just off Tyvola Road, Carolina has been through this before.

The fourth-seeded Tar Heels played a mostly desultory ACC quarterfinal game on Thursday night and got the result they earned, an 80-79 defeat at the hands of Clemson. The Tigers were tougher, executed better and were overall the better team for 37 of the game's 40 minutes.

By the time Carolina began a frenzied rally that cut the deficit from 15 points at the 3:30 mark to just one on Derek Dixon's three-pointer with three seconds remaining, some of the partisan Tar Heel crowd had already left the Spectrum Center. It had been that kind of game.

Just like it was in 2000, when the fourth-seeded Tar Heels played a mostly desultory ACC quarterfinal game and got the result they earned, a 58-52 defeat at the hands of Wake Forest. What happened over the next three weeks mostly washed away the memories of that game, but from someone who was sitting in the Charlotte Coliseum on that Friday afternoon—the mood that day wasn't good. There was serious talk that the Heels could be left out of the NCAA Tournament. They were 19-13.

And then something changed. Head coach Bill Guthridge kept his team in Charlotte rather than leaving immediately for Chapel Hill. He put them through what was by all accounts an intense practice. That was a combustible group of Tar Heels—Joseph Forte, Jason Capel, Kris Lang, Ed Cota and Brendan Haywood (who was in the Spectrum Center crowd on Thursday night) were a group that alternately either thrived off each other or acted like a group of individuals who had just been introduced to each other while waiting in line at The Rathskeller.

The loss to the Deacs, though, united them in a way they hadn't been for the previous 33 games.

"We woke up," Ed Cota remembered during his appearance on the Carolina Insider podcast in 2019. "That loss to Wake Forest really hurt. That's when it sunk in that we had to step up."

Now the 2026 Tar Heels have to decide if they want to make the same choice. It is true that Caleb Wilson is not available. It is also true that the Tar Heels still in uniform are better than what they put on tape Thursday night. Even Henri Veesaar, who was terrific with a career-high 28 points and career-high 17 rebounds, went through a 12-minute gap between field goals in the first half. He had just one field goal attempt during that stretch, and the rest of the Tar Heels weren't able to compensate. It was a full team breakdown.

At this time of year, that simply can't happen. Guys, this is Henri Veesaar. Throw him the ball. Henri, if they're pushing you around, push them back, sit down in the paint, and demand the ball. Clemson was able to seize control of the game by being more physical than Carolina, and that is how the season will end in the NCAA Tournament unless—as Cota said—there is a team-wide awakening.

"Clemson has always been physical defensively," Hubert Davis said after the game. "Their physicality took us out of our offense. We didn't respond to that until the latter part of the second half."

In that latter part of the second half, Carolina was excellent. They dictated play offensively and defensively. "We played desperate," Veesaar said. "We play good when we're desperate."

Then the only acceptable option from now until whenever the season ends is to play every minute desperately.

What happened to that 2000 team between the loss to Wake Forest and a magical run to the Final Four?

"Once we got into the NCAA Tournament," Cota said, "I could look around the room and guys looked like they really wanted it. They were ready to roll. We went to the next practice and a lot of things changed."

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