Record: 28-4, 12-2 (1st place)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Lost in national final
Final AP Ranking: 4
All-ACC Players: Larry Miller (ACC POY), Charlie Scott (1st), Rusty Clark (2nd)
All-Americans: Larry Miller (1st)
These late 1960s Carolina teams are all starting to run together… let’s see, this is the one that had Larry Miller and Charlie Scott, but not Bob Lewis. They lost Lewis from the 1967 team, but they added Scott. And they still had Dick Grubar, Bill Bunting, and Rusty Clark. They didn’t get a lot from their bench, but they didn’t need it.
After losing the third game of the season at #8 Vanderbilt, the Tar Heels won 20 straight before losing 87-86 at home to South Carolina. Then they dropped the last game of the regular season at Duke by the exact same score, this time in triple overtime.
They survived an overtime rematch with South Carolina in the semifinals of the ACC Tournament, then dominated NC State in an anticlimactic 87-50 final that still holds the record for largest margin of victory in an ACC Tournament final.
Their reward for such a great season was a round of 16 matchup with third-ranked St. Bonaventure and the great Bob Lanier. It seems strange that the #3 and #4 teams in the country would be playing in the round of 16, but at that time, the tournament bracket was based on predefined conference pairings rather than seeding, so these things happened. In any case, Rusty Clark held his own against Lanier and the Tar Heels had no problem with the Bonnies.
Their next game against Lefty Driesell and Davidson was much tougher, but the Tar Heels came back to win 70-66 behind 22 points and 17 boards from Clark. In the semifinal, they had a relatively easy time of it, pulling away in the second half to beat Ohio State. In the final, to put it bluntly, they got their tails kicked by a UCLA team that was just way better than everybody else and had probably the greatest college basketball player of all time in Lew Alcindor and was basically playing at home.
One of the things I like to do with old teams is to try and get a sense of how they played and what made them good from the limited statistics that are available. There is a wealth of statistical information on modern teams, but for teams from this era, you have field goals and attempts, free throws and attempts, total rebounds, and fouls, and that’s about it. No assists, no turnovers, no steals, no blocks, no breakdown of offensive vs. defensive rebounds. While there is a lot we don’t know, there are some things you can infer.
This team’s average margin of victory was 11.4 points. Interestingly, though, they didn’t shoot a much higher percentage than their opponents. Carolina shot 45.5% from the field and 68.1% from the line; their opponents were 44.4% from the field and 69.5% from the line. It is unusual for such a good team to not outshoot their opponents by more than that. Shooting percentages by themselves explain very little of that 11.4 point margin of victory.
So where does it come from? Well, if you’re not making a higher percentage of shots, but you’re scoring more points, you must be taking more shots, right? And they did. The Tar Heels averaged 6.6 more shot attempts and 6.5 more free throw attempts than their opponents. If you do the math, 6.6 shot attempts at 45.5% and 6.5 free throw attempts at 68.1% comes about to about 10.4 points. So nearly all of their point differential is explained by getting more shots than their opponents.
How does a team get more shots? Rebounding and turnover margin. Turnover margin is easy to understand; when a team turns the ball over, they don’t get to put up a shot. If your turnover margin is positive, that means you are taking away opponents’ shots more often than you’re giving up your own.
Rebounding is similar. When you get a defensive rebound, you are preventing the opponent from getting another shot; when you get an offensive rebound, you are potentially getting another shot for yourself.
So to summarize, there are four distinct skills involved in getting more shot attempts than your opponent:
- Forcing turnovers
- Taking care of the ball, i.e. avoiding your own turnovers
- Defensive rebounding
- Offensive rebounding
There is a tendency to think about rebounding in a general way and not to distinguish between the skills of offensive and defensive rebounding, but they really are distinct. There are plenty of teams who are good at one and bad at the other.
So we know that the 1968 Tar Heels used some combination of those four skills to generate so many additional shot attempts. Do we have enough data to get any more specific than that? Well, there is nothing at all on turnovers, but we do have total rebounds. Carolina’s rebounding margin was 4.4. What can we infer from that? Can we at least conclude they were a good rebounding team?
We can, but we have to consider more than just the rebounding margin. One problem with rebounding margin as a stat is it lacks crucial context about how many of the rebounding opportunities were offensive (off your own missed shot) vs. defensive (off the opponent’s missed shot). To see why this is important, think about a team that has a very low field goal percentage, say 42%, and allows opponents to shoot a very high percentage, say 55%. It will be almost impossible for a team like this to have a good rebounding margin, for three reasons:
- There aren’t many defensive rebounding opportunities, because the opponent makes so many shots
- The other team has lots of defensive rebounding opportunities, because we miss so many shots
- Most rebounds are grabbed by the defense
So even if this is a good rebounding team, rebound margin alone won’t tell you that, because the opponent is getting so many more defensive rebound opportunities than you are. For this reason, a team with a higher FG% than its opponents will tend to have a good rebounding margin due to more defensive rebound opportunities; and a team with a lower FG% than its opponents will tend to have a poor rebounding margin due to fewer defensive rebound opportunities.
In this case, the Tar Heels’ FG% is about the same as their opponents, but they still have a good rebounding margin. This tells you, all other things being equal, that they were a good rebounding team. What we don’t know is how that skill breaks down between offensive and defensive rebounding. There is simply no data to tell us that with any certainty.
What about turnovers? We have no direct statistics on turnovers, so you have to approach it indirectly by trying to determine how much of the overall disparity in shot attempts is attributable to rebounding, and assuming that the rest is attributable to turnover margin.
In this case, the Tar Heels put up 6.6 more shots and 6.5 more free throws per game than their opponents. Intuitively, I don’t think a +4.4 rebounding margin is sufficient to account for that. That means there must be a favorable turnover margin as well.
Then there’s a common sense way to approach it. Since this team has little to no advantage with FG/FT percentage, what made this team so good? If turnover margin is not an answer, then we’re saying, in effect, that the only thing this team was good at was rebounding, which doesn’t make sense. The best rebounding team in the world, if they’re average at everything else, is not going to be a Top 5 team.
I infer from this that the 1968 Tar Heels must have had a very good turnover margin. How much of that is attributable to forcing opponent turnovers vs. avoiding their own, it is impossible to say.