Kennedy Meeks barely did it, too. If he took a second longer? The shot clock — and possibly the North Carolina men’s basketball team’s hopes of returning to the Final Four — would have expired.
“Thank God Kennedy was right there,” Joel Berry said after UNC’s 72-65 win over Arkansas in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
The poke or tip or whatever else you want to call it came with less than a minute left in the game, UNC leading by just one. This, of course, was after the Tar Heels’ 17-point first-half lead turned to mush, after their offense skipped the tracks and wrecked itself. Considering the abomination of an offense the team trotted out for most of the game, that one point in itself might have been divine intervention.
And even with that slim cushion, UNC’s offense couldn’t sort itself out. As the shot clock wound down, Berry found himself trapped, dribbling to nowhere with no clear option of what to do.
So, he did the only thing he realistically could — he just chucked up a brick, almost an overhand throw of a shot with no chance of going in. It soared over the rim, bounced off the backboard, and finally fell back to the ground. A shot clock violation, it seemed, was unavoidable.
“It was a horrible shot on my part,” Berry said, “but I tried my best to get it up on the backboard.”
That’s what the team has been conditioned to do all season when things look rough: Toss it into the paint and hope a big man can clean up the garbage.
And with the season on the line, Meeks did. He bodied his defender, lept in the air, and right as the shot clock clicked down from one to zero, he poked the ball back up in the air.
