McCants Responds
The saga continues. It looks like McCants was misquoted to some degree. Yes he made certain references to jail (using a quote from his uncle) and referred to basketball as a job, but he never said "unc basketball is like jail". The job reference was more about how he takes basketball very seriously, as if it were a job.
McCants along with Roy held a press conference on Tuesday and
InsideCarolina.com was nice enough to provide a partial transcript and the full audio. The short of it is, Roy was pissed as hell. The madest he's ever been at a player in fact. He didn't let McCants practice on Sunday because he was so mad. He talked about the damage this has done to the program and how he is sure all of his current recruits have received a fax about McCants' comments (from the competition supposedly). Then he listened to the interview. He said he didn't agree with McCants' use of the term jail and job, but he thought it was poor journalism to take two sentences from a 10 minute interview and portray it the way it was. He wasn't very happy with the media. They actually replayed the full interview for everyone at the press conference. The sound was pretty low and I couldn't hear most of it.
McCants spoke and said he is "nervous". Said he loves Carolina basketball and his comments were completely taken out of context. He did reiteriate that he does feel that playing basketball at UNC is a job and one that he takes very seriously. He said he knows how lucky he is.
My feelings on this is that McCants is a very complex character. And I wonder if he doesn't suffer from depression or some other psychological disorder. Sometimes he appears to be hot and other times cold. He has a nack for saying things that get him into trouble. From the outside it looks like he has a bad attitude at times. I think he is very intelligent, but doesn't always consider how his actions will reflect on him. Mixed in with all of that, he is one of the best shooters to be at Carolina in a long time.
McCants is back at practice now and apologized to his teammates. I think this will blowover, but I wouldn't be surprised to see fans from some of our rivials wearing orange jumpsuits this year.
