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GREENVILLE, S.C. – If you thought 2011 was incomprehensible, improbable and insane, what VCU just accomplished on this night at Bon Secours Arena was all of that contained in 40 – no, 45 minutes – of NCAA Tournament basketball.
See, this wasn’t just about a team finding a path to March Madness glory, as the Rams did while climbing over such teams as Georgetown, Purdue, Florida State and Kansas on that shocking run from the First Four to the Final Four.
This was about a team stumbling lost through a forest, without a map or GPS, and happening upon a five-star resort.
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The Rams didn’t look as though they would win this game even while they were winning it. They missed all but two of their eight field goal attempts in overtime. They tried shots that would have been condemned by teammates in a summertime pickup game. And still they won, 82-78, because the North Carolina Tar Heels – oh, yeah, we should have mentioned all this happened against one of the game’s greatest programs – didn’t make a basket for the final 7:44 of the game.
And because Rams guard Terrence Hill shredded the Heels D for a career-best 34 points, all but 11 of those after halftime.
“Don’t give us no hope,” forward Jadrian Tracey told The Sporting News. “Because you give us that hope, we’re going to take it. Straight up.”
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Perhaps the only thing more bizarre than VCU’s recovery from such a 19-point deficit was the Heels somehow surrendering their advantage against a team quite obviously struggling for much of the game. It unfortunately fits a recent pattern. This became the Tar Heels’ second consecutive first-round elimination as a higher seed, although the first in which they were missing an injured All-American. Since an unexpected Final Four run in 2022, when Carolina made it as a No. 8 seed, they have missed March Madness once and gone 2-3 the other three seasons.
With just five minutes to play, North Carolina still led by 11. There was no hint this game would end with anything so dramatic as an overtime period, or that Carolina coach Hubert Davis would have cause to be so abrupt in his postgame press conference.
Asked why he shrunk his rotation to just six players over the late stage of the game, Davis responded, “Because that was my decision.”
Oh.
Well, it didn’t work.
Heels center Henri Veesar insisted he was not fatigued, but 23 of his 26 points were in the books by the 9:42 mark of the second half. VCU center Lazar Djokovic had a different explanation for that.
“The guy, he started talking a lot to me,” Djokovic told SN. “That’s what flipped – in Serbia, we call it inat – that flipped a switch in me: You ain’t getting this. That was his mistake. He shouldn’t be talking to me like that. He was acting tough, like he wanted to be the bully. That doesn’t run to me.”
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Lazar, who finished with 15 points of his own, explained the term is associated with tennis legend Novak Djokovic, no relation, but sent me to Google to figure out what it meant. And apparently it’s along the lines of achieving something through stubbornness or defiance, and that does sound like him. The tennis player, I mean.
“I feel like we got some stops, and those back-to-back threes I made, they had to switch the matchups,” Lazar said. “And after that, T Hill was getting whatever he wanted. It was his game.”
A 6-3 guard from Portland, Ore., Hill was averaging 14.4 points and never before had scored more than 24, but it was his drive that tied the game at 75-all with 11 seconds left in regulation, and he scored 12 of his team’s 19 points in the final 6:12.
“Every time he got a switch he really liked, he took advantage, and he went to work,” Heels guard Seth Trimble said. “He was incredible.
“That’s probably one of the most frustrating things about this game. He was having a good game, but I thought I was doing somewhat of a good job containing him and making things tough. I’m never going to pinpoint things on my teammates. That’s not the reason why we lost. But when we went away from that, I feel like it made it easier for him, for sure.”
The North Carolina tradition feels a burden at the moment, particularly for Davis. The Tar Heels own six NCAA Championships and 21 Final Fours, the most of any team. They never before lost first-round games in consecutive seasons because they’ve only done it eight times in the history of the program.
But it’s impossible to know how this season might have ended had not Caleb Wilson’s season ended a couple days before the regular-season finale against rival Duke. Wilson became a third-team SN All-America even though he played only 24 games.
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The VCU tradition, which began not with that 2011 Final Four but when J.D. Barnett took the Rams to five NCAA appearances in six seasons in the early 1980s, and continued with Eric Maynor's 'dagger' against Duke in 2007, seems to energize the current team. Tracey said playing occasionally against Brandon Rozzell and Bradford Burgess, members of that 2011 Final Four team and now part of Phil Martelli Jr.’s staff, offers a regular reminder of where he plays.
“When we play against them Final Four boys, they talk their trash to us,” Tracey said. “We definitely wanted to come out and take this one game at a time, not worry about the name on the front of their jersey, or the name on the back.”
When it was over, though, the name on the front of the opposing uniforms carried major weight.
“Shoot, we just beat Michael Jordan’s school,” Tracey said. “This is what we do.”
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