DURHAM – As the game clock crept below one minute remaining in North Carolina’s 94-81 upset of No. 4 Duke on Saturday night at Cameron Indoor Stadium, Brady Manek walked over to Hubert Davis and expressed gratitude.
Manek thanked his coach for bringing him to UNC so he could experience this stage, this night, and having a role in the Tar Heels’ momentous win. His coach’s response was to deflect Manek’s words, putting them right back on the 6-foot-9 graduate transfer from Oklahoma.
“He came over to me on the bench and he said, 'Thank you, coach,'” Davis recalled. “I said, 'For what?' He said, 'Just thank you for giving me this experience. This is why I came here.'
“And I say, 'No, no, no, thank you for coming here. Thank you for deciding to come be a part of this program.'”
Davis was surely also grateful for the 20 points and 11 rebounds Manek gave the Tar Heels in this sweltering hallowed hall. Add a blocked shot, a steal, and some pretty impressive defense in stretches, especially in the second half, as Manek was prominent in the Heels holding Duke star Paolo Banchero to 4-for-13 shooting and just eight points after the intermission.
But the exchange between the 14th all-time leading scorer in Sooners’ history and the rookie Carolina head coach was about a lot more than Manek’s stat line on the night. It was about 10 months of trust, work, perseverance, and finally tangible Carolina-like results.
Manek walked in true Carolina shoes Saturday, which is exactly what he wanted all along.
“It was an unbelievable game, just an unbelievable thing to be a part of,” Manek said afterward, leaning against a wall outside of UNC’s rowdy and emotional locker room. “Whether if it was Coach K’s last game or the Duke-Carolina rivalry or just a win on the road, it was a special moment for us, and I just can’t thank him (Davis) enough.”
Coach K, as in Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski, who led his team at home for the final time in a legendary 42-year career. Being a part of UNC basketball was one thing to Manek, having a chance to play in the famous Carolina-Duke rivalry was another, but winning in Cameron on the same night perhaps the greatest coach of all-time took the floor for the final time in the friendly confines?
That is storybook stuff. And now it’s part of Manek’s UNC story.
“This is the North Carolina experience I came to school to do,” he said. “It’s the experience I wanted to be a part of. This game is the best game I’ve ever been a part of. So special to me. I got to experience it with my dad, my uncle, and my aunt, and one of my best friends.
“So, it was unbelievable.”
The Tar Heels were unbelievable in the second half, hitting 59.4 percent of their shots and scoring 38 points over the final 10 minutes of the contest. A program-record four Tar Heels scored 20-plus points on the night, and Manek may have saved his best game in Carolina blue for this special evening.
Add three assists to Manek’s stat line, as he has now handed out at least three dishes 12 times this season, something he did just seven times in 122 games (111 starts) at Oklahoma. It was his third double-double of the season. But Manek wasn’t interested in talking numbers afterward.
He was somewhat in the same boat as most of his teammates. Aside from Armando Bacot and Leaky Black, the rest of the Heels were all novices when it comes to the Cameron Crazies and such an enormous stage.
They acquitted themselves quite well, Manek said.
“When I made the decision, this is one of the big things that pulls you to this school,” he said, as crowd noise during Krzyzewski’s postgame last-game ceremony carried on mere feet from a closed door near UNC’s locker room. “I hadn’t thought about it much, (maybe) ‘what if’ throughout the year you think of playing in this game. It doesn’t live up to what you think about.’
“It’s unbelievable. It’s more. It’s more than what I expected, more than what we expected. A lot of these guys never even played with the crowd either. It was super fun.”
And it’s why Manek chose to play his last year in college at UNC.
