It all (some of it) comes down (it’s just an early-season invitational) to this (ok it’s huge this is the biggest game Texas has played since the NIT Championship).
The Game
Texas vs. North Carolina (in Maui [in Asheville])
The Time
3:00 PM Texas Time
The Television
ESPN
The Opponent
North Carolina. The Tar Heels. 2010 NIT Championship appearers (and some other stuff).
What Texas Needs to Do
Win. Get that Shaka Smart NBA talk going. Get that extension drawn up. Get Austin another five years of the guy who was nice to me one time and mean to me zero times.
On the Court
It looks like a fairly typical Roy Williams UNC team. Long. Strong on the glass. Unrefined offensively. They’re going to challenge Texas’s own unrefined bigs at the rim, and they’ve got no shortage of frontline depth, so the pressure is going to be on Coleman, Jones, and Ramey to make shots and spread out the guys in blue. The pressure’s also going to be on Texas’s own big men to defend effectively but cleanly enough to keep themselves in the game. We may see a lot of Liddell and Hamm. We may see Brock Cunningham tasked with guarding Leaky Black for some stretches. Brock Cunningham might start a dust up. Oh man Brock Cunningham is definitely going to piss someone off today.
It’s not going to be easy. Well, I guess it could be. But it isn’t expected to be easy. And it’s as likely to be easy as it is to be disappointingly hard. But nobody said the Asheville Jim Maui Invitational presented by Camping World and Bill Walton’s Dog, Potter, Whose Birthday was Yesterday™ wouldn’t be hard at times. We signed up for this. By moving to Austin in 2019, stumbling into an NIT championship, and gaining an affection for this basketball program through their kindness when I was late to ask for an interview because I was nervous and was trying all the cookies at the NIT media luncheon.
Hook ‘em.
