Tar Heels listen to Williams, get serious about playing defense

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Minutes after North Carolina disarmed Oklahoma 72-60 yesterday, Coach Roy Williams accepted the South Regional trophy and addressed a lingering chorus of baby-blue howlers.

"I'm the luckiest guy in the world," he said, extolling his guys even though they played a little dumb with a 21-point lead. He paused and asked someone if the microphone was still on. It was.

"Now," he boomed, "we're going to have some fun. We're going to cut us down a net and go to Detroit."

One by one, the players climbed the 10-foot ladder, some of them national TV stars and some of them faceless walk-ons. But then there was the tall fellow with the towel draped over his head, topped by a certified, NCAA-issue regional championship cap.

Who was the sheik of scissors? None other than freshman Ed Davis, an off-the-bench agent of Carolina's suddenly chic defense.

Doing it with defense

The Tar Heels got to Memphis on the wings of their jet-propelled offense. Everyone knew it. Oklahoma players and Coach Jeff Capel routinely called Carolina the finest scoring machine in the country. The Tar Heels' 62-percent shooing in the second half and 15-for-16 mastery at the foul line confirmed it.

In the end, though, the Tar Heels got out of Memphis with title hopes intact because they finally fulfilled Williams' plea for world-class defense.

The Sooners blamed faulty shooting, repeating the eternal lament: "We got good looks. They just didn't fall." But good looks aren't necessarily good shots, especially when erratic marksmen launch them from afar and the national player of the year gets almost nothing before his team falls behind 13-2.

Blake Griffin, 6-10 and 251 pounds, produced a tidy stat sheet that nearly matched his season averages: 23 points on 9-for-12 shooting, 16 rebounds, one assist and three turnovers in 38 minutes.

The numbers didn't reveal how Carolina rotated four big men on Griffin, double-teamed him in the post and forced him to feed perimeter shooters who couldn't shoot straight. Oklahoma was 2 for 19 from the barren land of 3-pointers -- the first basket with 5:14 left and the second in the final minute.

"I wouldn't say I felt worn down," Griffin said. "They did do a good job defensively. I'm not saying they didn't."

The reigning young expert on that issue might be Marcus Ginyard, the Tar Heels' finest defender before an injury turned his senior serenade into a redshirt year.

His assessment: "I think that was our best defensive performance, certainly that I can remember. That's what it's going to take to get us through next weekend. We've got to be the best defensive team out there. They're going to hand that trophy to the best defensive team. There's no question about that, and there's no question we have a chance to be that team."

Hounding Griffin

Carolina relied on basic defensive principles against Oklahoma, but Williams emphasized the double teams as soon as the pass went inside to Griffin. The defender whose man threw the pass dropped down and clawed at the ball or formed a trap, encouraging Griffin to flip the ball back outside. That happened on the game's first possession, and point guard Austin Johnson missed a 3-point attempt.

The Tar Heels scored the first seven points, capitalizing when Griffin threw an exit pass out of bounds. Trailing 11-2, he tried to drive on Davis, but a guard stripped the ball and triggered a fast break. Ty Lawson (19 points, five assists, five rebounds) hit another layup on the way to winning the region's outstanding player award.

Tyler Hansbrough, Davis, freshman Tyler Zeller and Deon Thompson alternated turns on Griffin, some substitutions dictated by foul problems and others by design. Davis, who matches Griffin's height but weighs only 215, tried to nudge everybody's All-America out of the lane before the ball arrived. At the other end, Davis took his long left arm straight at Griffin, trying to dunk on his head.

"I'm not going to back down from no one, no matter who he is," Davis said. "I just see him as my opponent, so I'm trying to score. I don't look at it as him being one of the top players in the country."

Guard Bobby Frasor saw Davis' rubber-band arms disrupt a lob and discourage entry passes. "Ed's a little string bean, but he did the work on him a couple of times," Frasor said.

Thompson singled out Zeller as a defensive stalwart in his six-minute cameo. Zeller enjoyed the sensation of helping Carolina move on in the tournament, his stated reason for ditching a medical-redshirt waiver (broken wrist) 10 games ago.

"This is what I came back for," Zeller said.

Zeller called the defense an exaggeration of normal strategy, with emphasis on energy and rotation among the perimeter players to get hands in the shooters' faces or break down the offensive set entirely. Carolina spent the final minutes of Saturday's practice on that one point.

"It's pretty gratifying when we put out the effort to play defense -- if it works," Frasor said. "You get a win, and you hit big shots when you need to. So, we've proven to everyone watching today that we can defend. We're not just an offensive team. We're not just going to outscore you. We're going to get our stops.

"Blake's going to get his. He's a great player. You can do all you can to him, but he's going to score in certain ways. But we did a great job on him today. I don't think he really killed us."

He didn't, and the other Sooners shot their own tires flat. Oklahoma hit 36 percent in the first half, falling behind by nine points, and 44 percent for the game.

"The thing I like the most is, I know that we can do it," Ginyard said, "and I love how everybody thought we couldn't -- except the team. In fact, I think we take a lot of pleasure in proving people wrong. I just feel like people thought we weren't tough enough defensively."

The Tar Heels were tough enough on the banks of the Mississippi. The next river flows though Detroit, replete with ice, Villanova and mysteries unsolved.

■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com.