North Carolina forward Tyler Hansbrough has earned his nickname “Psycho T.”
He plays aggressively, relentlessly and with the ruthlessness of an assassin, admirable qualities that often wither both the will and the backbone of those he faces. That is why this snapshot from his team’s 84-66 NCAA tournament semifinal loss to Kansas was so revealing.
Darnell Jackson and Sasha Kaun, the most rugged of the Jayhawks’ big men, were on the bench in foul trouble, and playing in their stead was the 6-foot-11-inch Cole Aldrich. He is a promising freshman whose best moments are ahead of him, but there would be no back-down in him as he faced off against one of his game’s most daunting figures.
There was instead mettle in his spine, just as there was in the spines of all his teammates. That was clear when he and Hansbrough went after a miss by his teammate Darrell Arthur, clear when they took a death grip on the ball, clear most of all when Aldrich ripped the ball away from Hansbrough, went up and got himself fouled.
That one play personified the Jayhawks on Saturday night at the Alamodome, where they ran off with the triumph that moved them into Monday night’s title game with Memphis.
“If definitely feels good,” said guard Brandon Rush, who led them with 25 points. “We were the underdog the whole game. But we just came out, applied pressure and did some good things.”
They, in fact, did exactly what they had promised to do, which is come out and not fear running with the run-happy Tar Heels. Many had questioned the wisdom of that approach, including the Tar Heels themselves.
“We feel like we’re the best running team in the country,” Carolina shooting guard Wayne Ellington said before this game. “For a team to run with us, somebody’s going to give in and we’re pretty sure it’s not going to be us.”
That is how confident the Tar Heels were, but then the Jayhawks came out, exploded and simply embarrassed them.
“I had a lot of confidence in our defense,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “I didn’t think we could stop Carolina, but I thought we could slow them down, hold them below their average. … At the start of the game, instead of having 10 hands out there, we had 14, 16. I don’t want to say we put them on their heels, but it did get us into attack mode from the outset.”
They attacked, in fact, like a marauding horde, the force of their effort simply growing in power, their lead inexorably expanding from five with about 6 1/2 minutes gone to 11 with eight gone to a staggering 28 with 13 minutes, 15 seconds gone.
“They punched us in the eyes. We were too casual,” Ellington said when looking back on that.
Here his team roused itself and, over the next 22 minutes, pulled itself back to within six.
“It was right there,” Ellington said of this moment.
But, more significantly, he immediately added, “But then we kind of gave in when they started attacking again.”
The Jayhawks indeed had simmered down after their torrid start. That was inevitable. But now, threatened, they reclaimed their aggressor’s role and, over the next 3:30, ran off 13 straight points to put a fitting exclamation point to their remarkable evening.
“We never played not to lose,” Self said, pointing to one more admirable quality his team possessed this night. “We played to win down the stretch, and we had the playmakers to do it.”
———-
More Top Picks Earbud Cases