Tar Heels, Ducks aim for redemption
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Roy Williams could hear his own footsteps as he padded through the near-silent locker room, still trying to wrap his mind around a question that couldn’t be answered: What do you say to a group of players who did nothing wrong, but lost anyway?
In some form or other, that question has lingered at North Carolina all season. With a win against Oregon Saturday in the Final Four, the Tar Heels (31-7) will be back to the title game, where, a year ago, Villanova unraveled their dreams with one dagger of a shot — a game-winning 3 with the buzzer sounding.
“The most inadequate feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” Williams called the aftermath of the game. “What I did is, I tried to tell them, let’s focus on using this feeling as fuel, as motivation, to work extremely hard in the offseason.”
Most of the key players from the 2015-16 Tar Heels — among them, Joel Berry II, Isaiah Hicks and Justin Jackson — are back. They have a group-texting channel named, simply, “Redemption.”
The North Carolina players have walked the fine line this season between the natural inclination to dwell on the painful loss, and the impossible task of forgetting it.
“A dream was to get here,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t necessarily to get back here and get back what we thought we won last year.”
Oregon (33-5) had title dreams a year ago, too.
The Ducks were a No. 1 seed, but in an NCAA tournament that veered off the rails, guard Dillon Brooks got upbraided by the losing coach in the Sweet 16, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, who lectured him in the handshake line for jacking up (and making) an uncontested 3 while the teams were running out the clock. Then, the top-seeded Ducks ran into Buddy Hield in the Elite Eight.
They looked primed for another run this season, then big man Chris Boucher went down with a torn-up knee in the Pac-12 Conference tournament, and thoughts of Oregon repeating as a 1 seed went out the window. Instead, the Ducks were seeded third and largely overlooked coming into this year’s tournament. But now, they’re two wins away from the team’s second championship. The first came in 1939, the first year of the tournament.
“It was stunning when we found out that day that Chris was not going to be with us,” Ducks coach Dana Altman said. “We just had each of our guys step up and try to do a little more.”