“My sax was at school, but I sent it back home to Iowa so my sister could play in the jazz band,” he said,

The worlds of music and basketball have an intersection for Barnes, the leading scorer at 17.3 points a game for Midwest Regional top seed Carolina entering its game against 13th-seeded Ohio at 6:47 on Friday night.

“I guess you could describe the game as a compositional piece,” he said. "I mean, everything you do has to have a flow to it, just like music.

"It has flow, it has measures, it has an overall theme you're trying to accomplish. And as you play that and as you practice that, it becomes better, it becomes more masterful.

“You look at a game as you're adding strokes, you're adding paint to a canvas.”

So he has this season, coming to better understand how and when to get the right shots at the right times €" feeling the flow better.

That was evident to Boston College coach Steve Donahue in Carolina's 83-60 win over BC on Jan. 7.