Ty that binds
By NOLAN HAYES
February 5, 2007
CHAPEL HILL -- So far this season, only one player has been able to stop Ty Lawson from scoring. His name is Ty Lawson.
Ty Lawson is too fast for anyone who tries to guard him closely. He's too good of a shooter for anyone who gives him space. And at 5-11, he can make shots in the lane over players who stand a foot taller.
But Ty Lawson should be forgiven for not pursuing his own shot at every opportunity. With the talent surrounding him on the North Carolina men's basketball team, he has four good reasons to pass on every possession.
"When I'm coming down the court and I see Wayne [Ellington] spotted up on the right side, I know he's going to knock that down," said Lawson, UNC's starting point guard. "Brandan [Wright], if he's running the lane, I can throw it up as high as I want and he'll catch it. Reyshawn [Terry], I can go to him. Tyler [Hansbrough], I know he will finish."
Now more than halfway through his freshman season, Ty Lawson has become more comfortable finishing himself. He has averaged 16.8 points in UNC's last four games, shooting 61.9 percent from the floor during that span and posting career-high point totals in two of those contests.
Ty Lawson carries his hot hand to Cameron Indoor Stadium on Wednesday, when he leads the No. 5 Tar Heels (20-3, 6-2 ACC) against No. 16 Duke (18-5, 5-4) at 9 p.m.
Lawson found his scoring stride at halftime of UNC's game at Wake Forest on Jan. 24, responding to a reminder from Coach Roy Williams that the Tar Heels needed him to be a threat so that opponents couldn't focus extra defensive attention on his teammates. Lawson scored all 15 of his points in the second half that night, leading UNC to an 88-60 rout.
"At the beginning of the season, I didn't want to mess up the team chemistry because I knew the main focus would be Tyler and Brandan," said Lawson, who is third in the ACC in assist-turnover ratio (2.16-1). "So I just passed and tried to be like a regular point guard. But now Coach is telling me to score, so I can play like I did in high school."
Lawson, who averaged 5.8 shot attempts in 23.1 minutes per game through the first 19 games, has averaged 10.5 attempts in 25.5 minutes per game over the last four games. His teammates have embraced his newfound assertiveness.
"I like that," Wright said. "We definitely need him to play like that all the time."
As good as Lawson has been recently -- he tallied 21 points, seven assists and one turnover in UNC's 83-79 loss at N.C. State on Saturday -- Williams believes his point guard has plenty of room to improve. Lawson wasn't so sure of that before the season began, but he has matured enough to agree with his coach's assessment.
Still, he has maintained the precociousness that has led Williams to describe him as "Dennis the Menace." As the holiday season approached a couple of months ago, a reporter asked Lawson what he wanted for Christmas.
"Not a motorcycle but a little bike, a little motorbike, that I can ride around campus," Lawson said. "I hate walking."
Was that form of transportation an image UNC's coaches would be comfortable seeing?
"They might not," Lawson said, laughing. "But what they don't know won't hurt them."
Along those lines, Williams recalls a time during the summer when Lawson informed him that he had reached his potential in the weight room and didn't need to lift weights anymore. Then there was the day in practice when the Tar Heels voted on their worst practice player.
"It was him," Williams said of Lawson, who admits that he doesn't like to run unless he's dribbling a basketball. "All the guys were trying to be nice to him. They said, 'Well, he's in the top two or three.' I said, 'You guys, quit being nice.' But it was one of those kind of games that I try to play with him to get him to understand. He said, 'Am I really that bad?' I said, 'No, you're worse. We're trying to be nice to you.' But he thought it was nice of his teammates to take up for him.
"So the next day, Coach [Steve] Robinson came back from a recruiting trip, and I said, 'Coach, I haven't spoken to you about this at all, but who has the worst work habits on our team?' And he says, 'Ty. It's not even close.' And Ty said, 'You put him up to that.'
"But he really has gotten so much better. He's not telling me that he's reached his potential now."
Lawson made that discovery once the season began. He admitted after a 73-66 victory over Winthrop in UNC's second game that he underestimated the difficulty of college basketball -- "The whole college thing is much different than I thought because everybody is intense and wants to win, and they come at you every day," he said -- but he learned from that mistake.
Now, Williams wants Lawson to keep learning. As long as Lawson does that, there will be no stopping him.
"If you want to put it on an educational thing, he's in kindergarten right now," Williams said a couple of weeks ago. "But I think he can go to graduate school and graduate magna cum laude. I think that he has a chance to really be good. But I think right now, he is so new to everything that it's hard to evaluate him because I think he can get so, so much better. He's got to develop a much better work ethic, and the toughness and the work ethic in the off-season, we want to see how that works out.
"But he's got some gifts that a lot of other people don't have. And if he does do those things and gets extremely focused and works hard, then I think he is going to be a heck of a graduate student before it's over."
