16. Antawn Jamison, UNC, 1996-1998

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

Coming into the 1996 season, Carolina had a lot of question marks.  Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, and Donald Williams were gone from the 1995 Final Four team.  Jeff McInnis and Dante Calabria were the only returning starters.  Shammond Williams and Serge Zwikker hadn’t shown much.  But as usual, Dean Smith had a stellar recruiting class of Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, and Ademola Okulaja.  Carter was most highly touted of the group, making all the prep All-America teams.  But once the season started, it became apparent that Jamison was the star.

He played his way onto first team All-ACC as a freshman, one point ahead of Maryland’s Johnny Rhodes.  At the time, he was just the fourth freshman to receive that honor, the first three being Clemson’s Skip Wise, Georgia Tech’s Kenny Anderson, and Maryland’s Joe Smith.  But he didn’t stop there.  Jamison continued to expand his game, improving his free throw shooting, developing more of a perimeter game, and increasing his scoring totals.  By 1998, he was the best player in the country, making Bill Guthridge look like a genius and leading the Tar Heels to their second straight Final Four.  (ACC teams that won the ACC Tournament and made the Final Four in back-to-back years: 1963-64 Duke; 1967-68-69 UNC; 1981-82 UNC; 1997-98 UNC)

The first thing you noticed about Jamison was his unorthodox style.  He bounced around like a pogo stick out there, flipping up shots from all sorts of angles, but it seemed that all of them went in.  He was half a step and half a jump quicker than everybody else. He once scored 35 points against Duke and had the ball in his hands for a total of 53 seconds. He made himself into a shooter, progressing from a 53% free-throw shooter as a freshman to one of the top 100 three-point shooters in NBA history in terms of three-point FGs made.

Jamison as a collegian has a very similar career profile to Jason Williams.  Both three-year players; both were National Player of the Year as a junior.  Jamison I think was a little better as a freshman.  I guess you could argue that Williams was a little better as a sophomore; he was a first team All-American while Jamison was second team.  Ultimately, it’s a coin flip.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player who has the sense of presence on the court that Antawn has. His feel, his sixth sense – all of that is unprecedented. You could almost spin him like a top, blindfold him, and throw him the ball. He could shoot without looking, and it would go in. – Dave Odom, quoted in What It Means to Be a Tar Heel by Scott Fowler