PARADISE ISLAND, Bahamas– Paradise lost.
North Carolina came into the Battle4Atlantis looking to re-establish itself as royalty in college basketball. They quckly learned they were not ready for prime time yet.
Unbeaten 4-0 Butler– which struggled with its transition to the Big East last year– physically outplayed the fifth-ranked Tar Heels during a 74-66 victory in the first game of this elite eight team tournament in the Imperial Ballroom
of the Atlantis Resort. The fundamentally sound, old school Bulldogs made up for a poor 30.6 percent shooting performance by embarrassing Carolina oj the glass. The Bullddogs outrebounded the Heels, 57-40, and grabbed 29 offensive rebounds. They outscored Carolina 19-13, on second chance points and got to the line 29 times, making 21 free throws.
This, along with unbeaten Villanova’s victory over Michigan in the Legends Classic, did wonders for the tarnished image of the new Big East.
“They were much more aggressive than we were,” Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “We had 26 defensive rebounds. They had 29 offensive reobunds and 19 more shots. Even at half, when we wre winning by three,
they were getting all the 50-50 balls. They had five guys boxing out on every posession.”
“It’s a man’s game and we let them push us around under the rim,” Carolina forward Isaiah Hicks lamented..
No one saw this one coming. It was a shock to the sellout crowd of 3,136, which was dominated by Carolina fans and a disappointment to promoters and ESPN officials, who recognize the power Carolina has in the Neilson
ratings. The Battle4Atlantis has attracted the best fields in the country in the last two years. This year, organizer Lea Miller signed two per-season Top 10 teams– Wisconsin and Carolina– and four others, Oklahoma, UCLA, Florida
and Georgetown, who have marquee names. Interestingly, in the tournament’s three years, none of the top seeds have ever won the tournament.
But Carolina has now disappeared from ESPN’s holiday coverage as has UCLA, which lost to Oklahoma, 75-65, in the second game of the afternoon doubleheader. The Tar Heels have been relegated to a 7 p.m.
consolation game tomorrow night against the mighty Bruins that will be shown on AXS TV.
“It’s not the end of the world,” Kansas coach Roy Williams said .”Back in 2002, when I was at Kansas, we lost to Ball State in the first round of the 2001 Maui Classic and still made it to the Final Four.”
That Kansas team which had Drew Gordon, Kirk Hinich and Nick Collison, won 29 games and led the nation in field goal percentage and scoring.
This Carolina team is still a work in progress. Williams, who used 12 players, has more than his share of McDonald’s All Americas, but he is still searching for a cohesive rotation the way he does every year and an
additional shooter who can take some pressure off the Heels’ pre-season All American guard Marcus Paige, Carolina’s only proven shooter. Paige finished with 18 points, but shot just 5 for 17 for the game and was
just 1 for 8 in the first half when he was suffocated defensively. by senior guard Alex Barlow.
Paige never got going until the second half after the Heels had fallen behind by 14 points with 8 minutes to play. .
“I had a bad first half,” Paige said. “I took a couple of bad shots but they played good defense ande we had trouble getting into our sets.”
Carolina did not help itself from the free throw line, making just 18 of 32 attempts and missing 12 in the second half and even though they pulled within four points in the final 35 seconds, they couldn’t come
all the way back after being called for a backcourt violation on their final possession..
“We lost patience,” Williams said. “And you can’t do that against a good team.”
Williams got a taste of Butler two years ago when the Buldogs defeated Carolina, 82-71, i the first round of the 2012 Maui Classic. “They had four or five of the teams back from that team that beat us by about 88 points.”
Butler was coached by Brad Stevens back then, the young prodigy who had coached the Bulldogs to a pair of Cindrealla Final Fours in 2010 and 2011. Stevens left for the NBA Boston Celtics in 2013. This year’s team is coached by an interim Chris Holtmann, who replaced Brandon Miller in pre-season as the temporary guardian of Hinkle Field House after Miller was forced to take a medical leave of absence.Holtmann joined Stevens’ staff in 2011 after spending three years as the head coach of Gardner-Webb so he undestood the system and the personnel.
The fact that Barlow and famillair names like Kellen Dunham, Roosevelt Jones and Kam Woods were back has made the transiton easier. The fact that freshman forward Kelan Martin could be the second best freshman
in the Big East behind Jordan Classic guard Isaiah Whitehead didn’t hurt either.
Barlow finished with 17 and Martinj had 17 poitns and six rebounds for a team whose sum is greater than its parts. No one, for example, considered Barlow a Division I prospect coming out of high school and Jones
is an oddity– a 6-4 forward with guard skills. But Butler has a hsitory of making mismatched pieces work. The Bulldogs has much better chemistry than Carolina at this point of the season.
Butler will play Oklahoma in the first semi-finals at 1 p.m. tomorrow. The Sooners got by UCLA behind 24 points from guard Buddy Held, who is from the Bahamas who attended Sunrise Christian Academy in kansas. Held had a special homecoming .for his family and friends, who made the trip to Atlantis from Freeport.
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