2003 Top 50 List: Not eligible
Dan Collins List: Yes
I hated him too, but he was damn good. Two-time ACC Player of the Year. Two-time ACC Tournament Most Outstanding Player. National Player of the Year as a senior, runner-up as a junior. Second-leading scorer all time (to Tyler Hansbrough) in the ACC. All-time leader in three-pointers made, both single-season and career. Career free throw percentage leader. That’s a Top 10 player.
His senior year was flat out one of the greatest seasons in ACC history. He averaged 27 points with the True Shooting Percentage of 63%. He averaged 29.4 in ACC games. There is a strong case for that as the greatest offensive season in ACC history. Remember how he did it? After three years of bombing threes with incredible proficiency, he suddenly added a floor game and starting driving. He shot nearly as many twos as threes, and he got to the line, and he made them all, or at least it seemed that way.
What I remember most are the daggers. More than any player I can remember, he hit daggers. You were hanging around, keeping it close, trying to make a run late in the game, and then Boom. Boom. Boom. You’re done. Good night.
If there’s anything you can hold against Redick, it’s that he laid some eggs in the NCAA Tournament. In both 2005 and 2006, Duke was a #1 seed after winning the ACC Tournament. In both years, they were upset in the Sweet 16, and Redick shot 4-for-14 and 3-for-18 respectively in those games. For his career, he played in six games in the Sweet 16 or later, and he shot 28% in those six games. He did not have a signature performance in a big NCAA Tournament game.
But he sure had some in the ACC Tournament. He is, in fact, the tournament’s all-time leading scorer. As a freshman in 2003, Redick scored 23 points in the last 10 minutes to lead the Blue Devils to a comeback win in the final against NC State. And that’s not one of the two years that he was Most Outstanding Player. If one were making an All-Time All-ACC Tournament team, Redick would be on it. It’s an interesting fact (courtesy of the Greenville (SC) News of March 17, 2003) that in that 2003 tournament, the votes for Tournament MOP had to be submitted with four minutes left in the final. Redick scored 13 points in those last four minutes. Had the votes been submitted after the game, Redick would probably be the only three-time ACC Tournament MOP.
I think Redick, as good as he was, was underestimated. He kept surprising you by getting better when you figured he had peaked. He was more athletic than you think, but he didn’t overwhelm anyone with his size or quickness. So there was a tendency to think, how much better can a one-dimensional, not-all-that-athletic shooter get? The same thing happened in the NBA. It took him several years to really get his career going, and a lot of people wrote him off as someone who would never be more than a bit player. But he figured things out. He knew what he was good at, he understood how the games were called, he made moving without the ball a science, and he worked hard to develop his game to maximize what he did well.