2003 Top 50 List: No
Dan Collins List: No
ACC basketball in 1995 was as good it’s ever been (OK, maybe 1974 was better). It had produced the national champion in 1991, 1992, and 1993 and the runner up in 1994. In 1995, the sophomore class featured Joe Smith, Jerry Stackhouse, Tim Duncan, and Rasheed Wallace. Smith was the consensus National Player of the Year. Wake Forest, UNC, Maryland, and Virginia all tied for the regular season title at 12-4 in the league. The tournament was incredible, featuring a 97-92 semifinal win for UNC over Maryland in overtime, and then the classic final, as Wake Forest beat UNC 82-80 in overtime behind Randolph Childress. All four of the top teams made the Sweet 16, meaning the league went 8-0 in the first two rounds of the NCAAs.
But just as the ACC was experiencing its highest high, the seeds of college basketball’s demise were being sown. That very season was the first in which more than 1-2 players had been lost to early entry to the NBA. Six players from the 1994 first and second team All-America teams – Jason Kidd, Donyell Marshall, Glenn Robinson, Clifford Rozier, Lamond Murray, and Jalen Rose – had left early. And it was those departures that opened the path for Smith, Stackhouse, and Wallace to make All-American themselves.
So we can draw a line in the sand between the 1994 and 1995 seasons. Starting in 1995, and forever after, All-American starts to get diluted; because there are players of the same age in the NBA who absolutely would have made it, instead of the players who actually did. Stackhouse was a beneficiary of that. The year before, Kidd, Marshall, Robinson, and Rozier were all underclassmen on first team. It seems likely they would have made it again, leaving only one spot for a new player, who probably would have been Joe Smith. Of course, Chris Webber was in the NBA too, having left the year before, so the 1995 team probably would have been Webber, Kidd, Marshall, Robinson, and Rozier.
But Stackhouse was a tremendous player. His stats are hurt somewhat by the fact that in 1994, Dean Smith insisted on starting Brian Reese and Kevin Salvadori and bringing Stackhouse and Wallace off the bench. Wallace finally moved into the starting lineup late in the season, but Stackhouse never did. He was MVP of the ACC Tournament, but evidently that wasn’t enough to unseat Reese, who was still starting in the NCAA Tournament when the Tar Heels were upset by Boston College in the second round.
In 1995, Stackhouse edged out Randolph Childress by six points for the last spot on first team AP All-America, with Wallace and Duncan not far behind. All of them were chasing ACC and National Player of the Year Joe Smith, who led the voting. This is one of only three years in which the ACC placed that many on the AP team. The others are 1974, when there were six (David Thompson, John Lucas, Bobby Jones, Len Elmore, Tom McMillen, Tom Burleson), and 2005 (JJ Redick, Chris Paul, Sean May, Shelden Williams, Raymond Felton).
Stackhouse had a long and, in some ways, impressive NBA career, but he was a notoriously inefficient offensive player, consistently taking a high volume of shots at a low percentage. You didn’t see that coming in college; his True Shooting Percentage in 1995 was 60%, which is very good, and he shot 41% from three. It seems that he did not develop much as a jump shooter in the NBA, instead relying on his elite athleticism and ability to get to the line. Rasheed Wallace was a better NBA player.