Record: 32-2, 12-2 (1st place tie)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Won
Final AP Ranking: 1
All-ACC Players: James Worthy (1st), Sam Perkins (1st)
All-Americans: James Worthy (1st), Sam Perkins (2nd)
This team checks all the boxes as one of the greats.
- National champion: check
- ACC Tournament champion: check
- ACC Regular Season first place: check (tied with Virginia)
- #1 ranking: check
- Record: 32-2, check
- Roster: Worthy, Perkins, Jordan. check
Of the teams we’ve reviewed so far, I’d say they are the first that has a credible argument to be at the top of the list.
Let’s recall the setting. The early 1980s Tar Heels were locked in a multi-year death struggle with Ralph Sampson and Virginia. The 1981 team had been ranked behind Virginia all year but had the last laugh, winning the ACC Tournament and beating the Cavaliers in the Final Four behind one of the all-time great performances by Al Wood. A dominant performance by Isiah Thomas in the final kept the Tar Heels from winning it all, but it was a great year.
Going into 1982, there were big shoes to fill with Al Wood graduating, but the young core of Worthy, Perkins, and Matt Doherty were back along with senior point guard Jimmy Black. Add to the mix an under-the-radar freshman named Michael Jordan, and the Tar Heels were preseason #1.
Sampson and Virginia were hot on their heels again. Wake Forest and NC State also had good teams that were ranked much of the season. The Tar Heels and the Cavaliers split their regular season meetings and each team lost only one other game, so that going into the ACC Tournament, each team had two losses. Carolina was ranked #1 and Virginia was #3. Unlike 1981, there were no early round upsets and the much-anticipated rubber match took place for the ACC title on March 7, 1982. The Tar Heels survived a slowdown affair, winning 47-45, and UVa was left to ponder another disappointment. (This game is said to be a contributing factor to the ACC’s decision to adopt a shot clock for 1982-1983.)
The Tar Heels were the top seed in the East. After an opening round scare against James Madison, they advanced steadily through the bracket, not blowing anyone out, but not really being threatened either. In the national semifinal, they topped a precocious Houston team with Drexler and Olajuwon to set up the titanic final with Georgetown.
The Hoyas had struggled through the first half of the season. After a three-game losing streak in mid-January, they found themselves out of the polls entirely. But freshman Patrick Ewing (or Pat, as he was called at the time) was finding his game and starting to dominate, and Georgetown caught fire. Coming into the national championship game, the Hoyas were 16-1 in their previous 17 games and were riding an impressive 9-game winning streak in which no opponent had scored more than 54 points. The Hoyas had dominated the West region.
One of the things this game is remembered for is the way that Ewing started out the game goaltending everything. In fact, the Tar Heels’ first four buckets were all goaltends, and in all Ewing goaltended five shots in the first ten minutes of the game. It seems to me that this fact has not received the attention it should in terms of its impact on the outcome of the game. Going back and watching the game, I found myself asking, what the hell was Georgetown thinking? These were obvious goaltends, not a single one was a difficult call. Essentially they spotted the Tar Heels ten points. Did they think James Worthy and Sam Perkins were going to be intimidated? That’s laughable. In a game that finished with a one-point margin, every point matters. I don’t think it’s an overreach to say that’s why Georgetown lost.
The game overall was played at a high level. Both teams shot 53% from the field (although North Carolina was below 50% on non-goaltended shots). Worthy played a magnificent game, going 13-for-17 from the field and scoring almost half the Tar Heels’ points. Black and Doherty clearly had no intention of shooting, so it fell to Jordan to be the third scorer to take some pressure off of Worthy and Perkins, and he was up to the challenge. We all know what happened at the end.
A few other observations about this team. They had no bench, and I mean no bench. Nobody off the bench averaged as much as two points. In their five NCAA Tournament games, they got a total of seven points off the bench. They could not have afforded an injury, nor could they afford foul trouble. Fortunately, they were very good at not fouling. They had only six foul-outs as a team for the whole season.
On a related note, they played a very slow tempo. I think there were several reasons for this. One, it helped them stay out of foul trouble. Fewer possessions = fewer fouls. But it wasn’t just them. That 1982 season still marks the lowest points per game average across the conference ever. Everyone was playing slowly. You might think it was ugly basketball, but it really wasn’t. Field goal percentages were high; six of the eight teams in the ACC shot over 50% from the field. But without a shot clock and without a three-point shot, possessions were long as teams passed it around the perimeter for quite a little while looking for an opportunity to get the ball inside. Watching games from that era, that’s the thing that sticks out to me as most obviously different – the number of wide open perimeter shots that are passed up, and guards and wings who had no intention of taking them.
So don’t be fooled by the seemingly unimpressive stats from 1982. Worthy’s 15.6 points per game would be 20-25 in a different context. He was a stud.
I said at the beginning that this team has a credible argument as the best ever. So why aren’t they? They have the resume, but what they lack from my perspective is dominance. Compared to the other candidates for the top spot, they had a lot of close games. Their average margin of victory was “only” 11.3. There are probably 80-100 ACC teams with a larger average margin than that. That’s not quite a fair comparison; because of the slow tempo, a margin of 11.3 is bigger than it sounds. But again, relative to the other candidates for the top spot, I just feel like this team was the least dominant.