Alright, I think all the levels are set. Showtime! Now?
Right now! This is The Drive with Josh Crayer on SportsHub Triad. Happy early birthday to daggum Roy Williams, who will turn 70 years old tomorrow. And in honor of the milestone birthday, gosh it's crazy to think this is the last day of July.
Tomorrow's August the 1st, really? I've got a list here of Roy's five best wins against Duke as head coach of the Tar Heels. So let's jump right in.
Number 5. 2018 ACC Tournament. The Tar Heels beating the Blue Devils in Brooklyn. It's the only time Roy has beaten Duke in the ACC Tournament. They've faced off three times, including in a championship game. That was back in 2011.
Kyrie Irving, he came back at around that time. You might remember that year specifically. But yeah, Roy and Ky have only met three times in the ACC Tournament. The one win was a couple years ago in Brooklyn.
Number 4. 2006 No. 13 North Carolina beating No. 1 Duke in Cameron. It was Tyler Hansbrough's freshman season. I remember we had Wes Miller on the show talking specifically about that game and just how exciting the locker room it was after the game.
How great that bus trip home was. Beating Duke. It was JJ Reddick's senior year and I think they took care of business on senior night. So the last time JJ Reddick and company stepped on the floor for the Blue Devils at Cameron, it was a loss to the Tar Heels as the No. 1 team in the country.
That's the No. 4 Roy Williams win against Duke as the head coach of the Heels. Number 3. 2011 ACC regular season title hanging in the balance. Duke No. 4 in the country facing 13th rank North Carolina.
It's senior night at the Smith Center. Duke's 13-2. Carolina's 13-2. This was the best shot Duke had of winning an ACC regular season title in the last decade. This and also the 2019 team with Zion where I believe if Zion doesn't blow out his shoe, they take care of Virginia Tech. They probably beat North Carolina at Cameron. They have a good shot at beating them at the Smith Center too. But even if they drop that game, I still think they finish No. 1 in the league standings. I'm not sure how much it matters to Kay that this entire decade they didn't win an ACC regular season title since even in the 2019 season they got the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament with the ACC tournament win. But they had an opportunity against the Tar Heels in Chapel Hill. Both teams 13-2 and the Tar Heels came out on top 81-67. That was back in 2011.
No. 2. Putting up 100 points in Cameron. And this wasn't an overtime game. It was the most lopsided North Carolina win under Roy Williams against Duke. 101-67. Tyler Hansbrough finishing his career with the Blue Devils or with the Tar Heels.
It's almost sacrilege to do right there. 4 for 4 in Cameron. Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson. It was the national title team. They took care of business.
They did so in a major way. And then a month later, they swept the Blue Devils that year that the Tar Heels won the title. No. 1. It's got to be Roy's first win against Duke. There's nothing like the first time.
2005. Duke has already beaten Roy a couple of times heading into this matchup. And quite frankly, Duke should have won the game. JJ was really good in this one.
Melchioni is really good in this game. Melchioni hit a corner 3 with about 3 minutes left to go to make the game 73-64. And North Carolina scored the last 11 points of the game and ended up winning it just remarkably.
They just went on a run. You had Carolina down 1, Marvin Williams at the free throw line. Or I think it was Raymond Felton at the free throw line. He misses it and then Marvin Williams hits the putback while getting fouled and all of a sudden North Carolina is on top in the final minutes.
It was a frequent final seconds. Sean May got the rebound to close things out. The Tar Heels got their first win against Duke under Roy Williams in 2005. It was the remarkable senior night rally that then sparked a run through the NCAA tournament where Roy got his first national title against Coach Weber in Illinois. Those are Roy Williams' top 5 wins as the head coach of the Heels on the eve of his 70th birthday. You can tweet the show at sportsubtribe if there's something I've missed.
336-777-1600 is the phone number. Brian Geisinger of accsports.com is going to join us in 10 minutes. The NBA bubble already resuming action today. Robert's incredibly distracted.
Rather than focusing on show stuff, he's looking at the camera angles that they have in the Orlando bubble. Robert even said just a few minutes ago to me, right before the mic's turned on, that, man, has sports always been this long? Have sports always taken this long to finish up? Because last night, man, I was up to about midnight. It is a little strange, though, having 6.30 tipoff times, roughly, and having 9 o'clock for the NBA. Robert, you're an NBA fan.
This definitely beats the 8 o'clock and 10.30 time slots, right? I didn't forget how long sports was. I said, I remembered how long sports are now. Because two games, I was sitting there at the computer watching these things for six whole hours.
Like, I made dinner, went out and grilled, but still, it was just a long time, especially after not having sports for so long. I see that a couple of St. Louis Cardinals tested positive for COVID, so they're going to postpone that game later on tonight. The Marlins, they're bussing 20 COVID-stricken players back to Miami from Philadelphia. And it's just been a big mess for Major League Baseball, while it seems everything's going well in Orlando. Knock on wood, not sure if that was caught on the microphones at all, but what you're seeing with the NBA, and to a degree the NHL, but I'll be more of a judge of that after this weekend as play starts tomorrow with the Hurricanes and Rangers. The difference between the NBA's bubble and what Major League Baseball is trying to do, the NBA focused so much on the details and baseball clearly didn't. They maximized the time to make sure they thought of every possibility. Baseball didn't do that.
Rob Manfred, he spent much of the summer focusing on nonsense, focusing on labor, focusing on negotiating in bad faith that when they ultimately came to an agreement, well, they weren't thinking about the actual product being thrown out there. Oh, yeah, we'll just have some virtual fans. It'll look great. It doesn't. All those empty seats, it's brutal to watch. Now, baseball's hurt by the fact it's not as quickly moving as the NBA.
It's not up and down or anything of that sort. There's a lot more space to cover up. But if you spent more time focusing on the product rather than the labor dispute, you'd probably be in a lot better place. The players would probably have more confidence in you. They would feel better about what's being put out there.
They would feel like this is something they can finish up. If you're Major League Baseball, how do you have any level of confidence in the commissioner after everything that happened with the Astros, the suspension of Joe Kelly while no Astros have been punished for all the cheating they did a few years ago, and then all these COVID tests that have turned up positive? Adam Silver has a great relationship with the players. They trust him.
The players do view Adam Silver as a partner. And last night it paid off. The social justice stuff, it didn't seem like just lip service. They spent a lot of time on the telecast. They didn't steer away from it.
They allowed opportunities for players to voice their opinions, and I got a feeling the ratings are still going to be very good for the NBA considering how much we're hungering for sports right now. Also, the product just looks really good. The bubble, it just looks really good. I was really concerned about it, but it's really enjoyable to watch. Let's go to Kevin in Burlington, who wants in. Kevin, you have a theory on what Major League Baseball has been teaching us right now.
What exactly is that? Well, first off, I want to say you're a smart man, Josh, because this morning when I woke up and I looked at the box score because I didn't get to watch the game, I was like, yeah, Josh will be getting a phone call from me about his little double-double prediction yesterday, but you owned it, so you took all the fun out of it for me. Before you elaborate on that, I want your take on what is baseball telling us? What is your take on what are they telling us as far as the probabilities? If they're getting it at the rate they are, and I'm not saying it's astronomical numbers, but they're getting them, what's the chances to contact sports like hockey and pro football and college football, and Lord forbid, if the NBA has another breakout, I just don't see it happening.
Thanks for the call, Kevin. I'll tell you what Major League Baseball has taught us, that traveling right now is a dangerous proposition. What hockey has limited, they don't have a conventional bubble like the NBA, where you're locked down to a specific campus. The NBA, it's incredibly strict, but they have hub cities.
Everybody is in one place, so they don't have to travel anywhere else. A lot of the issues Major League Baseball is dealing with is trying to trace where the issues have come from, so that way they can get to the source of it. It's tough to do that when players are traveling all across the country to different ballparks. It's just a different deal.
They're trying to expedite that a bit by having the NL East play the AL East and just play teams in your division, but still, even doing that, it's enough travel where you're going to have a lot of issues. But I will encourage people, as I said yesterday, when you see these types of headlines in the age of COVID, take a breath. In, out. Is that how you breathe? You breathe like you're hitting a joint?
You're just ching chonging over there? Listen here, man. Don't be that concerned about Major League Baseball, bro. I need to be worried about this Epstein stuff, man. Listen, it's not baseball that's the problem. It's America, dude. Alright, there's a big NC State basketball headline for today. We'll get to that and talk, you guessed it, about Zion and the NBA's return with Brian Geisinger next.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-16 15:48:54 / 2023-05-16 15:53:53 / 5