North Carolina Tar Heels: Winning the Ugly Way
The North Carolina Tar Heels won the 2017 National Championship by capping an imperfect tournament with an imperfect game for the perfect ending.
The North Carolina Tar Heels did it. They won their sixth national championship and third under Roy Williams by beating Gonzaga 71-65 in a game much closer than the score might indicate. With this game, the Heels won in every weird conceivable way during this NCAA Tournament. Last night was no different as the Heels finally had a game where Justin Jackson did not have his usual shooting performance and they won anyway.
Gonzaga deserves to be celebrated too as a team that put it all out on the floor, even though it looked as if both teams were trying to drag basketball back thirty years by the style and quality of play. So let’s look at what happened during the Championship Game to make it the Tar Heel victory that it finally turned into.
- Josh Perkins set the tone
Gonzaga point guard Josh Perkins was a non-factor in much of the tournament, but he found his inner Dylan Ennis and scored thirteen points in the first half. He was a consistency in a game that did not have much of it. Perkins’ performance was prologue that this was a game that would be decided by unconventional means.
- Back-And-Forth
This game never got stretched out by all that much. The Tar Heels were down by seven with ten minutes to go in the first half and then they won by six in the final seconds. The margin stayed in that very competitive distance the whole game.