UNC recaptures positive energy

It’s been a fleeting feeling this season. There have been spurts of it, but it’s usually gone as quickly and abruptly as it came. During North Carolina’s 80-61 win against Clemson Sunday, the Tar Heels found it.

They were able to have fun.

“It was really fun to see the kids have a little more fun again,” coach Roy Williams said in his radio show Monday night.

“James Manor tried to set the world scoring record. Six points in 35 seconds , and I told him not to shoot the last one. It ended up no telling what he could have gotten.”

While he acknowledged a few factors vital to the victory, Williams said the greater level of play really boiled down to one ingredient.

“I think it all came because of our sense of urgency,” he said. “We rebounded the ball and we finished plays when we rebounded.”

The Tar Heels out-rebounded Clemson 37-31 while claiming 12 second-chance points.

But while North Carolina played with urgency, the game’s leading scorer was quite the opposite.

“James Michael (McAdoo) always rushes things,” Williams said. “And I think he settled down a little bit there.”

McAdoo had 22 points — leaps and bounds higher than his season average of 14.8 points per game — shooting nine for 13 from the field.

Williams was much happier with his junior forward Sunday than a previous game he remembered. Against a physical Boston College team Jan. 18, his big men were avoiding contact, shooting fade-away shots instead of going up strong down low.

“So I took James Michael out and put Kennedy (Meeks) in and … well, I threatened him,” Williams said, laughing. “I didn’t say I was going to kill him, but I told him if you get the ball and you don’t take the ball to the basket just come over here and sit down. We’ve got to be more aggressive.”

Meeks, who got his third start of the season Sunday, gives Williams something he so desperately needed a year ago — an inside scorer.

Williams referenced two prior seasons that stick out in his memory, two years that hang in the rafters of the Dean E. Smith Center, two championship seasons won on the backs of two champions.

“You go back and you look at all the great teams that North Carolina has had,” Williams said. “When we’ve had a chance to win a national championship and the two that we’ve won since I’ve been here we’ve had Tyler Hansbrough and Sean May.”

McAdoo and Meeks aren’t yet Hansbrough and May, but they are pieces of the puzzle Williams is trying to put together. It might not happen this year, but it’s a puzzle that he hopes will culminate in another championship.

And what’s more fun than that?

sports@dailytarheel.com