75/74/73. Lee Shaffer, North Carolina, 1958-1960; Pete Brennan, North Carolina, 1956-1958; Lou Pucillo, NC State, 1957-1959

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: Yes (all 3)

[Pucillo] shows me something different every time I see him play. He’s always thinking one step ahead of everyone else on the court. – Everett Case, quoted in Legends of NC State Basketball by Tim Peeler

Pete Brennan, Lou Pucillo, and Lee Shaffer form a cluster of players who are very hard to distinguish.  You could throw John Richter and perhaps Tommy Kearns in there too, but I think Richter and Kearns are a notch below the other three.  Each was ACC Player of the Year, in 1958, 1959, and 1960 respectively.  Each received similar All-American support as a senior, making some second teams and some third teams.

Pucillo was one of the greatest little guys ever, standing at 5’9″. He was a brilliant ball handler and a bit of a hot dog who was the perfect quarterback for the up tempo style that Everett Case wanted to play. Pucillo hardly played high school basketball at all. His big break came playing for Temple Prep after high school, when Vic Bubas happened to see him playing against the Philadelphia School for the Blind (who presumably weren’t on the basketball team) and Deaf.

Brennan, of course, played a major role on North Carolina’s 1957 national championship team, but he wasn’t the best player, or probably even the second best; Rosenbluth and Kearns made first team All-ACC, while Brennan made second team.

I’m going to rank them Pucillo, Brennan, Shaffer.  I’m putting Pucillo at the head of the group for two reasons.  One, he was ACC Tournament MVP in 1959; two, he made first team All-ACC twice.  Brennan and Shaffer did not.  But they really could be listed in any order.  They are so close that I’m keeping them together in my rankings.

Did you know that Shaffer is the first ACC player who was an NBA All-Star?  Well OK, I’m cheating a little bit.  Gene Shue of Maryland is actually the first, but his last year in college was 1954, so he played only one year in the ACC.  After Shue, it was Lee Shaffer.  After Shaffer came Billy Cunningham, Jeff Mullins, and Jack Marin, and the spell was broken.  Mullins, drafted in 1964, was the first ACC player to have a really good NBA career, unless you count Shue.

It’s a curious phenomenon.  The ACC’s best players had zero success in the NBA prior to the mid-1960s.  Here are the NBA careers of the ACC’s best players and highest draft picks from its first ten seasons:

Player	Team	Pick #	Draft Year	Yrs	G	Points	Reb	Win Shares	All-Star	All-NBA
Gene Shue	Maryland	3	1954	10	699	10068	2855	38.9	5	2
Mel Thompson	NC State	31	1954	never played
Rudy D’Emilio	Duke	39	1954	never played
Dickie Hemric	Wake Forest	12	1955	2	138	863	703	5.3	0	0
Buzz Wilkinson	Virginia	20	1955	never played
Ron Shavlik	NC State	4	1956	2	8	10	23	-0.3	0	0
Bob Kessler	Maryland	15	1956	never played
Ronnie Mayer	Duke	28	1956	never played
Joe Belmont	Duke	40	1956	never played
Vic Molodet	NC State	62	1956	never played
Len Rosenbluth	UNC	6	1957	2	82	342	145	-0.7	0	0
Grady Wallace	South Carolina	40	1957	never played
Pete Brennan	UNC	4	1958	1	16	40	31	-0.1	0	0
Joe Quigg	UNC	12	1958	never played
John Nacincik	Maryland	22	1958	never played
Tommy Kearns	UNC	30	1958	1	1	2	0	0	0	0
John Richter	NC State	3	1959	1	66	285	312	0.4	0	0
Herb Busch	Maryland	38	1959	never played
Lou Pucillo	NC State	67	1959	never played
Lee Shaffer	UNC	5	1960	3	196	3291	1240	8.2	1	0
Al Bunge	Maryland	7	1960	never played
Dave Budd	Wake Forest	10	1960	5	353	2505	1623	11.7	0	0
York Larese	UNC	12	1961	1	59	302	77	0.3	0	0
Doug Moe	UNC	14	1961	played in the ABA starting in 1967
Doug Kistler	Duke	26	1961	1	5	8	1	0	0	0
Len Chappell	Wake Forest	5	1962	9	591	5621	3113	19	1	0
Art Heyman	Duke	1	1963	3	147	1519	414	4	0	0
Jerry Greenspan	Maryland	25	1963	2	25	122	83	0.4	0	0
Larry Brown	UNC	56	1963	played in the ABA starting in 1967

That’s pretty dismal, isn’t it?  You have one guy, Shue, who had a good career.  You have a couple of guys in Chappell and Dave Budd who had respectable careers.  Chappell, I think, dealt with some injuries that kept him from being as good as he might’ve been.  Shaffer was good for three years, then quit to go into business.  Heyman had a pretty good rookie season with the Knicks, then fell off and was out of the league in three years, although he came back to play some good basketball in the ABA.  Hemric was a role player for two years for the Red Auerbach Celtics teams and won an NBA championship in 1957, but it appears that he fell behind Tom Heinsohn in Auerbach’s pecking order, so he walked away.  And the rest of the players on this list had no career at all to speak of, including Shavlik, Wilkinson, Rosenbluth, Wallace, Brennan, and Pucillo.

Though this initially struck me as surprising, as I’ve thought about it more, it makes a little more sense.  First off, there were only eight teams in the NBA (nine with the addition of the Chicago team in 1962).  So there were very few spots to be had.  With 8 teams, you’re talking about only 40 starting positions, and maybe 60-70 positions with regular playing time.  It was really hard to make it.

Second, there were no teams in the south.  The league was northeastern (Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse, New York), midwestern (Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago), and western (Los Angeles).  And it wasn’t particularly lucrative.  Many players at that time were married, sometimes with a family.  So for a lot of them, it just wasn’t worth it.  It made more sense for them to get a job.

But there were other players from the South who made it.  Bob Pettit from LSU, Bailey Howell from Mississippi State, Hal Greer and Jerry West, if you count West Virginia as the South.  So it wasn’t impossible. 

This is one factor (among many) that leads me to conclude that the quality of play in the ACC wasn’t that great during this period.  The Big Ten, the Big Eight, the PAC-10 predecessors, the Missouri Valley, and arguably the SEC and Southwest Conference were playing better basketball, top to bottom, than the ACC.  I think this was true up until the mid-to-late 1960s.