Justin: Former Players Set the Model for Seth Trimble's Road Back

North Carolina is 3-0, going into another game on Friday against North Carolina Central. But the big story is the absence of Seth Trimble. Seth broke a bone in his forearm and had a successful surgery. I’m wishing him nothing but the best and super fast healing. But what does this team look like until he’s able to come back?

The biggest thing that you can think about and could see in the Radford game is the leadership aspect. Leadership, to me, is defined maybe a little different than what some people would say. During my time in North Carolina, I experienced guys like Marcus Paige, Kenny Williams and Theo Pinson having unfortunate injuries throughout the seasons. Kenny hurt his knee and was not able to return, was out longer. Theo and Marcus had a more similar situation to Seth of getting hurt early on in the season, but being able to return.

I saw some examples of how they handled it that can also help in this situation. For those guys, not being able to go out on the floor and practice and play and do the things that most basketball players would say are fun, was super challenging. But they still showed up every day. Their attitude was that they were still trying to get better every single day.

The coaching staff, the strength & conditioning staff, Jonas Sahratian and Doug Halverson, they still had them doing things – coming in and lifting, getting rehab, things like that to help them come back from the injury. But their mentality through it all was, ‘I will be back, and I want to make sure that I’m going to be ready when I come back.’

And so for Seth, that’s the encouragement that I would have for him. And the challenge for him is, ‘How do you show up every day?’ Because at the end of the day, your leadership is going to be seen in that attitude that you have when you show up, and the extra work that you put in, whatever it might be that you can do going through this injury. Because the rest of the guys see that, and that bleeds through the rest of the team. And so for Seth, it’s a matter of doing that every single day — showing up, putting in the time, putting in the effort.

And then on the flip side, it’s also very important for the rest of the team to also keep Seth fully involved. It’s easy, whenever somebody’s not playing, or somebody’s not fully engaged, whether in practice or in a game, to just focus on what you have going on. But making Seth feel like he’s fully involved, whether that is still going out to eat with him, talking to him about a certain game, playing a game, just hanging out, making him feel involved. All of those things are also important for the rest of the guys to do.

So then you look at how it translated onto the floor in the game Tuesday. North Carolina pulled out an 89-74 win against the Radford team that put up a lot of fight, but was just less talented than this North Carolina team. You saw some evident things throughout the the game that I wasn’t surprised because of this adjustment period that this team is going to have to go through without having their real, true leader on the floor.

I wasn’t too shocked in how the game flowed and how it went because of the reality of coming off of a massive game against Kansas in which a bunch of guys played well — the whole team pulled through in the second half and had a pretty dominant win. Maybe it’s easier to take an opponent like Radford for granted. And that’s what you saw throughout the game in spurts. When you look at the game and break it down, there were not too many things, stats-wise, that were a ton different. North Carolina still shot 31 threes and grabbed 18 offensive rebounds.

The big discrepancy that I saw was in the amount of rim attacks – UNC missed the amount of pressure that Seth is able to put on the defense at any given time. Throughout the Radford game, the Heels still had rim pressure, they still had put-backs, but they looked a little bit different. A lot of it was out of transition, or out of pick and roll, or a missed defensive assignment by Radford.

Compare this to the game against Kansas when you see Seth make his mind up and say, ‘I’m going to attack the rim. I’m gonna go put two feet in the paint and try to make something happen for the team.’ So even though the three-point attempts were no different as they were coming into the game, you saw a lot more possessions where the ball never touched the paint. You saw a lot more swing, swing, low-in-the-shot-clock threes.

And so it’s going to be an adjustment. They have a few more games until they have their big-time matchup against Michigan State and then Kentucky after that. They’ve got some games to be able to adjust and make certain things happen within the offense, to make up for some of that rim pressure that you lose from not having Seth.

But going forward these guys have the pieces. They have the players who can step in and play bigger roles and to try to bandage things up. So what guys can show up? I’m interested to see what guys can step into those bigger roles and try to plug in as much as possible until Seth’s return.