2003 Top 50 List: No
Dan Collins List: Yes
The years between North Carolina’s 1982 national championship team and their 1991 Final Four team were years of unfulfilled promise and frustration. During this eight-year period from 1983 through 1990, the Tar Heels:
- Finished in the Top 10 seven times
- Were a 1 or 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament seven times
- Finished first (or tied) in the ACC regular season standings five times
- Were ranked #1 in the country at some point in five of those years
- Went 87-25 in ACC play, including two 14-0 seasons
- Advanced to the Sweet 16 all eight times
And what did they have show for all that? Zero Final Fours, 1 ACC championship. That’s it.
Kenny Smith’s career sits right in the center of that stretch. His career was bookended by the two best teams in that group, the 1984 team and the 1987 team, both of which went 14-0 in the ACC regular season. So Smith experienced a tremendous amount of regular season success, but he lacks the signature postseason moment that you would expect from such a good player in such a great program. It’s not his fault, of course. It’s not anybody’s fault; it’s just one of those things that happened. Starting in 1991, the Tar Heels were in the Final Four six out of the next ten years. Nothing changed but their luck.
Smith is another one of those players who is difficult to rank because of a major disparity between his ACC honors and his national honors. In 1987 he was named first team All-American by all the major services. But in the ACC Player of the Year vote, Smith lost to Horace Grant by a wide margin. Grant was second- or third-team All-American. So was Smith one of the five best players in America, or not? If Smith had been, say, a third-team All-American, I’m not sure his record would be strong enough to be in the Top 100 at all.
This is where it would be great to have insight into All-America voting totals. This can often shed light on what might seem like a curious decision by the voters. Unfortunately, the AP lost its mind from 1979-1989. They drastically changed their voting methodology, going from hundreds of writers to a panel of ten or fewer, and they stopped releasing voting totals. So there is really no transparency to what happened.
For one thing, I think Smith benefited from being a guard. 1987, for whatever reason, was a year where big name guards were lacking. Besides Smith and Steve Alford, the only other guard who could have even been considered for first team was Mark Jackson. The UPI at that time voted by position, so they had to put two guards on first team. Grant, in contrast, was blocked behind forwards Danny Manning and Reggie Williams who had first team locked down. I don’t think the AP was voting by position, but because of the lack of transparency into the voting, it’s hard to be sure what they were doing.
Ultimately, I think it was a little bit of all of that. Smith was legitimately an outstanding player who was worthy of consideration, and he got a little boost from being a guard in a year with weak guard play, and a little boost from that Carolina uniform and the fact that he had played umpteen games on national television as the point guard of the #1 team in the country over the previous four years.
At the time he graduated, Smith was the ACC’s all-time assist leader. Keep in mind that assists had only been an official stat for 15 years or so at the time. He has since been passed by six other players. Also, Smith’s senior year was the first year of the 19’9” three point shot. He led the ACC with 87 threes that year. You can estimate that he lost 150-200 career points by not having the three until then.