CAROLINA, VILLANOVA TO BATTLE FOR CROWN
North Carolina’s inside game, board power overwhelm Boeheim’s vaunted 2-3 zone
HOUSTON — This looked like an inside job all the way for North Carolina.
Then, out of nowhere, Marcus Paige figured out how to hit from three-point land and the Tar Heels pulled away from Syracuse — and within one win of the program’s sixth national title.
Using layups, floaters and putbacks — and, finally, three very timely threes from Paige — Carolina stifled another comeback by the Orange on the way to an 83-66 win in the Final Four on Saturday.
Syracuse trimmed a 17-point deficit to seven with just under 10 minutes left. At that point, the Tar Heels (33-6) were 0-for-11 from behind the arc.
“I wanted somebody in a North Carolina uniform to make it,” coach Roy Williams said of his team’s first three.
That someone turned out to be Paige. He finished with 13 points and Brice Johnson and Justin Jackson led North Carolina with 16 apiece, as the Tar Heels, the lone No. 1 seed in the Final Four, beat Jim Boeheim’s 10th-seeded Orange for the third time. North Carolina opened as a two-point favorite over Villanova in the title game on Monday.
The Tar Heels, ranked 284th in the country from long range, bricked up three after three, barely drawing iron on a few of their 10 misses in the first half. Paige opened the second with North Carolina’s 11th miss, and for the next 10 minutes, the Tar Heels basically ignored the three.
Only when Trevor Cooney and Malachi Richardson triggered the 10-0 run by Syracuse to make the score 57-50 did Carolina start thinking long range again. Paige made three bombs and Theo Pinson hit another to help the Heels pull away and make them almost respectable from the three-point line: 4-for-17 for the game.
“Marcus was hitting some bigtime open shots,” said Johnson, his roommate and teammate. “If you’re going to leave Marcus Paige open, I’m quite sure he’s going to make a lot of those.”
Before Paige found his range, Carolina built its lead on the inside, with big-time help from an in-yourface defense that held Syracuse’s leading scorer, Michael Gbinije, to 12 points on 5-for-18 shooting. The Orange (23-14) went 8-for-25 from three-point range and shot 40.9 percent overall.
“We didn’t have to play perfect, but we had to shoot better tonight,” Boeheim said.
In all, North Carolina offered a reminder of the days before the three-point shot was invented, when the way to really beat a zone — and Boeheim’s 2-3 is the best in the game — was to make blink-ofan-eye passes in and around the paint and crash the offensive glass to take advantage of a defense that doesn’t put bodies on bodies when the ball goes up. That plan still works. Early in the second half, Jackson made a jump pass from the corner to the lane, where Paige was waiting and batted the ball with an open hand over to Kennedy Meeks (15 points, eight rebounds), who dunked. A bit later, Joel Berry got an easy offensive rebound and a layup to put the Tar Heels ahead by 17.
North Carolina finished with 16 second-chance points on 16 offensive boards. Points in the paint: Tar Heels 50, Orange 32.