With eight minutes and 19 seconds remaining in North Carolina's dominant win against the Terrapin men's basketball team last night, the Dean Smith Center crowd stood in applause.
The play was a pretty one - an alley-oop dunk for Tar Heel forward Danny Green from center Tyler Hansbrough. But the rousing ovation wasn't just for one highlight-reel dunk.
The Tar Heel faithful were watching something truly worth cheering for, a team capable of winning a National Championship, taking the final step coach Roy Williams' previous two teams have been unable to make. No, the No. 3 Tar Heels (20-2, 6-2 ACC) didn't beat the Terps quite as thoroughly as archrival Duke did on Jan. 24. But that game was largely the product of the Terps' own inadequacies.
Last night's 108-91 dismantling of any semblance of a Terp defense was simply one team being better than the other - and, quite possibly, anyone else in the country.
The Tar Heels were 11-of-15 from 3-point range in the first half alone. Guard Wayne Ellington, the team's third-leading scorer, went off for 34 points, and it wasn't even his career high.
On one play, Terp center Braxton Dupree stole the ball from North Carolina's Bobby Frasor. Dupree got the ball to teammate Cliff Tucker, who flew down court for an easy lay-up. Well, easy until Green emerged out of nowhere, flew across the paint and sent Tucker's shot flying. Frasor grabbed the ball and sent an outlet pass to point guard Ty Lawson.
Tar Heel center Deon Thompson finished Lawson's alley-oop pass. In seven seconds, what could have been a 15-point deficit for the Terps, a part of a six-point mini-run, became a 19-point Tar Heel lead.
It was over when ... every Tar Heel was in the right place at the right time.
It was over when ... one team was vastly bigger and more athletic than the other.
It was over when ...
"Against a team like North Carolina, you show any inkling that you're not ready to play, and they just go after you," Terp coach Gary Williams said.
The Tar Heels are the type of team that gives opponents absolutely no breathing room. Even in a game in which their defense allowed the Terps to shoot 48 percent from the field, even in a game in which they turned the ball over 16 times and allowed the Terps to match them on the boards (39-39), North Carolina emerged with a 17-point win.
Tar Heel coach Roy Williams offered an analysis for the blind: "We're pretty gifted."
What's even scarier about this Tar Heel team is how little they seemed to appreciate scoring 108 points against an ACC opponent. Green seemed genuinely dejected about the defensive performance. Lawson noted that the team needed to take serious strides if they were to get back to the Final Four. Hansbrough sullenly answered questions in the same way he would if his team had barely slipped past the underdog Terps.
Roy Williams? He was practically angry.
"I don't like giving up 91 points, to say the least," the 58-year-old coach said. "I was frustrated at the end, and I did the smartest thing I've ever done with my team and told them I wasn't going to say much. Because right now, I'm a little too frustrated."
Yeah, coach - what a horrible performance.
Look, Roy Williams is too good a coach and North Carolina is too experienced - they returned all but third-string guard Quentin Thomas and backup forward Alex Stephenson from last year's Final Four rotation - to allow midseason defensive frustrations to carry into the stretch run. This team has more talent than any other in the country, despite injuries to lockdown defender Marcus Ginyard and 7-foot freshman Tyler Zeller and the suspension of reserve guard William Graves.
Whether they want to hear it or not, and with all regards to Duke and Connecticut and Pittsburgh and Oklahoma, North Carolina is the best team I've seen this year in college basketball. And, if you're wearing Carolina blue, that's something truly worth a standing ovation.
ajosephdbk@gmail.com
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