UNC back in Sweet 16 after tough win over Michigan State: ‘You’re not going to bully us’

The moment of reckoning for North Carolina came about midway through the first half against Michigan State here on Saturday night, during a timeout huddle in which Hubert Davis, the Tar Heels’ third-year head coach, challenged not his team’s ability to execute but his players’ will; their desire to play with the kind of intensity and effort this stage demanded.

Davis and his team knew what they were up against. They were no stranger to the mythology surrounding Michigan State and its longtime hall of fame coach, Tom Izzo; they knew the Spartans would try to impose their physical might; that, indeed, Michigan State would try to play the role of schoolyard bully, a team looking for a fight and to steal UNC’s place in the Sweet 16.

Photos: North Carolina defeats Michigan State in NCAA Tournament

“A lot of teams try to bring that mentality to beat us,” Harrison Ingram, the Tar Heels junior forward, said after the Tar Heels’ 85-69 victory, one in which the final score belied the grit to achieve such a margin. “They think they can bully us. We’re a smaller team, we’re North Carolina — quote-unquote pretty boys. But at the end of the day we love those types of games.

“We’re ready and we have an older team this year. So you’re not going to bully us.”

And yet, well, midway through the first half the Tar Heels found themselves on the other side of a bullying. They were not the aggressor but the reactor. Michigan State, with its size and muscle and its desire to make things ugly, to coat UNC’s sports car of an offense with a layer of mud, struck first. The timeout when things began to change came a little more than eight minutes in.

Through the legs of the people standing on the outskirts of the Tar Heels’ huddle, Davis’ arms could be seen going this way and that, hands punching the air to punctuate his points; his sports coat struggling to contain his movement and his frustration. It was vintage “Live Action” Hubert, and it had nothing to do with X’s and O’s but sheer want-to and heart.

Cormac Ryan, the UNC graduate student guard, put it like this:

“Coach Davis challenged us in the huddle, to be tougher. He said it’s not going to be about basketball until we raise our energy and our toughness, and he was right. It wasn’t an X’s and O’s thing. It was an energy thing.”

Ryan spoke with a yellowing blotch of a bruise over his right eye. It wasn’t from Saturday, he said, but a battle scar of another time.

“That’s old,” he said. “But I kind of like it.”

And it was that kind of game against Michigan State: bruising. Hard. Painful, in moments.

“Sure was,” Ryan said, with a smile, and he liked that part of it, too — that the Tar Heels had to fight for a victory that leaves them among the last 16 teams remaining in the NCAA Tournament. They’re heading to Los Angeles now, and to a West Regional semifinal on Thursday.

Tar Heels talk the talk

Such a trip was in doubt, during the first 10 minutes. Michigan State built a 12-point first-half lead and the Spectrum Center, with its legions of Tar Heels supporters in their Carolina blue, a great many of them expecting to see a show or a coronation, sat quietly nervous.

And then, at last, came the awakening and the accompanying noise. It began with an Elliot Cadeau three-point play, and included two Ingram 3s and another from RJ Davis. And on the other end, the Tar Heels, whose defense has been more efficient than their offense for most of this season, clamped down on the Spartans and held them to but a single made shot from the field over the final eight minutes of the first half.

How’s that for toughness? For a willingness to fight?

That 12-point deficit evaporated in the blur of a 26-5 run during the nine and a half minutes before halftime. From there, for UNC, it became a contest of maintaining; of responding to whatever response the Spartans attempted to mount.

This was the kind of second round NCAA Tournament game that can, and often does, forge a team for something bigger. It came with all the trappings of March: a name-brand pairing between two of the sport’s March regulars; with Izzo on the sideline, attempting to squeeze one more unlikely run out of his team; with some early drama and high stakes and no shortage of talk.

Oh yes, there was a lot of that, Ingram and his teammates said afterward.

“They were talking, and it feels good to send them home,” said Ingram, who finished with 17 points and seven rebounds and a dagger of a 3-pointer in the second half – one that went round and round the rim before falling through with about six and a half minutes remaining.

That gave the Tar Heels a 12-point lead that never again slipped into single digits.

But back to the talk.

“I’m not going to say what they were saying, no, but they were talking,” Ingram said, and talking “a lot.” “That might be the most I’ve heard a team talk in a while.”

Armando Bacot, the fifth-year senior forward who was a force, and up for the physical challenge Michigan State posed, said the Spartans offered trash talk “before the game, during the game.”

“We never go out there trying to talk trash,” said Bacot, who finished with a team-high 18 points and seven rebounds. “But if they’re going to talk trash, we’re going to go out there and talk trash, and we’re going to back it up. So that’s just really what happened.”

UNC stands up, moves on

Neither Bacot nor any of his teammates detailed the alleged talk. Whatever it was, though, it undoubtedly provided some measure of motivation. After UNC recovered from the shaky start, the Tar Heels led by nine at halftime and fought off several determined Spartan charges.

Michigan State cut UNC’s lead to two points, with 16 minutes remaining, and for the next 10 minutes or so the Spartans lingered. Like the schoolyard bully on the other side of their own medicine, though, eventually they reached their limit. Eventually their punches stopped landing and they took too many hits of their own.

Every time Michigan State tried to come back, UNC countered.

The Spartans trailed by no more than seven points for an eight-minute stretch of the second half and then, finally, the Tar Heels delivered the decisive plays. A Cadeau layup that gave UNC a nine-point lead. The Ingram 3-pointer that followed. And after a while that poor start was something like a distant memory, the Tar Heels talking about lessons in toughness.

“We knew that this game would start and end with toughness, and it didn’t start with it, for us,” said Ryan, who finished with 14 points and two 3s, including one at the start of the second half that pushed UNC’s lead to 12 before Michigan State came back. “We came out and we weren’t not the tougher team.”

But it was a different story by the end, thanks in large part to that game-turning run during the final 10 minutes of the first half. Of all the highlights it contained, one of the most memorable was when Paxson Wojcik, the reserve guard, led the Tar Heels on the break and found RJ Davis in the right corner for a 3-pointer that was as pure as it was never in doubt.

Wojcik, the son of Michigan State assistant coach Doug Wojcik, began celebrating Davis’ shot when it was still in the air. When it fell, the Tar Heels had a four-point lead. They’d crawled out of the hole they’d dug, that Michigan State helped them dig, and Izzo called for a 30-second timeout. It was part of a decisive stretch for UNC, one when it asserted itself and stood up to the bully.

One when, maybe, the Tar Heels themselves took on that role. And now they’re onto the West Regional semifinal in Los Angeles, a little more battle-tested than they were before Saturday, a little more ready, they hope, for the fights ahead.