Tar Heels find late touch
deficit to seven did Carolina start thinking long range again. Paige made 3 threes and Theo Pinson hit another to stifle the rally and make Carolina almost respectable from the threepoint line: 4 for 17 for the game.
“We had a brain lapse there for about three minutes in the second half, but other than that I thought we were really good defensively against a team that’s hard to guard,” said Carolina coach Roy Williams, in search of his third title.
Kennedy Meeks finished with 15 points and eight rebounds, including a paddy cake putback after batting a second offensive rebound to himself off the glass. That gave the Heels a 67-53 lead.
Before Paige found his range, Carolina built its lead on the inside, with bigtime help from an in-yourface defense that held Syracuse’s leading scorer Michael Gbinije to 12 points on 5-for-18 shooting.
“We didn’t have to play perfect, but we had to shoot better tonight,” Boeheim said.
The Orange hit only 8 of 25 three-pointers.
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-of-an-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 Meeks, 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. Even more telling were points in the paint: Tar Heels 50, Orange 32.
Syracuse trailed by 16 in its crazy comeback victory over Virginia last week to make it here. But there was no full-court press that could beat the Heels, and no meltdown awaiting from them either.
Cooney led the Orange (23-14), the first No. 10 seed to make it to the Final Four, with 22 points. Richardson had 17, but after his three trimmed the deficit to seven with 9:48 left, Syracuse couldn’t pull closer.
“I’m more proud of this team than . . . of any team I’ve coached,” Boeheim said.
“Enjoy the Dickens out of it until midnight,” Williams said, “and then worry about that other team.”