Record: 34-4, 13-3 (2nd place)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Lost in national semifinal
Final AP Ranking: 1
All-ACC Players: Antawn Jamison (ACC POY), Vince Carter (1st), Ed Cota (2nd), Shammond Williams (2nd)
All-Americans: Antawn Jamison (National POY), Vince Carter (2nd)
Rarely in the history of college basketball has a new coach inherited such an embarrassment of riches as Bill Guthridge did in his first season as the head man. The Tar Heels returned everyone save Serge Zwikker from the 1997 Final Four team, including second team All-American Antawn Jamison and superhuman athletic freak Vince Carter, who had grown by leaps and bounds as a sophomore and had Tar Heel fans practically drooling at what he might do as a junior. Add in a couple of solid veterans in Shammond Williams and Ademola Okulaja, another year of experience for talented point guard Ed Cota, transfer Makhtar N’Diaye to provide interior size, and a strong (on paper) recruiting class led by seven-footer Brendan Haywood, and it’s a mystery the Tar Heels were only ranked fourth in the preseason poll. Who did they think was going to be better?
Wait, I can answer that: Arizona, Kansas, and Duke. Arizona was the defending national champion, so that one is understandable. Kansas was returning Paul Pierce and Raef LaFrentz from a 34-2 team, so that explains that one. And Duke had Avery, Brand, and Battier coming in.
In any case, the Tar Heels were loaded. I hate to say that all Coach Gut had to do was roll the balls out, because there’s always more to it than that, but mostly he just had to not screw things up.
They came out on fire, demolishing seventh-ranked UCLA by 41 in the fourth game of the season and winning their first 17 games before an overtime loss at Maryland, which was really starting to find its legs as a program under Gary Williams. In the first Duke showdown, Carolina dominated the top-ranked Blue Devils 97-73 and grabbed that ranking for themselves.
There was one head-scratcher, a 14-point home loss to NC State in late February. That was the only other blemish as the Tar Heels took a 27-2 record into the regular season finale at Cameron. This time, UNC blew a 17-point second half lead as Duke rode the energy of the home crowd to a 77-75 win.
The rubber match came eight days later in the ACC Tournament final. Carolina had survived an overtime thriller against Maryland in the semifinal. This one was tight for a while, but a 13-0 run midway through the second half sealed it for the Tar Heels.
In the NCAA Tournament, they survived a surprisingly tough second round matchup with UNC-Charlotte, then defeated Michigan State and UConn to earn a trip to the Final Four. That’s where it all went wrong. The Tar Heels played a terrible semifinal game, shooting 39% from the field and going 3-for-23 from three and 2-for-7 from the line in a 65-59 loss to a good but inferior Utah team. Carolina was the best team in the country that year, but the best team doesn’t always win.
One oddity of the way Bill Guthridge coached this team was the six-man starting rotation. He distributed starts evenly among six players, leaving one of them out each game seemingly at random. Here are the number of starts by player:
- Jamison, 32 (out of 38 total games)
- Williams, 32
- Carter, 32
- Cota, 31
- Okulaja, 32
- N’Diaye, 30
- Haywood, 1
Isn’t that odd? N’Diaye, in particular, always seemed like an strange fit for the Carolina program as a transfer. Even as a freshman, Brendan Haywood was probably a better player. In the Utah game, N’Diaye fouled out in 14 minutes with zero points. I wonder if that Utah game would have turned out differently had Haywood received those 14 minutes instead. With N’Diaye’s foul trouble, the Tar Heels went small for a lot of the game, and they had trouble containing Utah’s big men Michael Doleac and Britton Johnsen.
This team was really good at a lot of things. They shot 13.4% better than their opponents from the field, 51.8% to 38.4%, and while I have no easy way of checking, that difference must be close to a record. They made 124 more free throws than their opponents attempted. They were an exceptional offensive rebounding team. They had rim protectors. They took care of the ball. They didn’t foul (except for N’Diaye). They weren’t a prolific 3-point shooting team, but they were efficient with the ones they took.
But they were caught with a shaky big man situation. Haywood wasn’t quite ready, and N’Diaye just wasn’t that good. Tar Heel fans might remember that they were supposed to have Vasco Evtimov, but he was forced to sit out the 1997-98 season and part of the next because he had played for a kind of semi-pro team in France. He wasn’t paid, but some other players were, and the NCAA decided that gave him an unfair advantage. But was he good enough to make a difference? Maybe not.