Record: 26-10, 8-6 (3rd place tie)
ACC Tournament: Won
NCAA Tournament: Won
Final AP Ranking: 16
All-ACC Players: Sidney Lowe (1st), Thurl Bailey (1st)
All-Americans: None
I probably can’t tell you anything about this team that you don’t already know, but there are two points I would like to make.
First, this “Cinderella” team was better than you think. Yes, they lost 10 games, and maybe they needed to win the ACC Tournament to get into the NCAAs, though I’m not certain of that. But if you look at their season, they were ranked in the Top 20 until Whittenburg got hurt. They had a neutral court win over a ranked West Virginia team, and two competitive road losses at Louisville and at Missouri, both ranked. And they were whupping #2 Virginia – until Whit got hurt. And then they fell apart. Counting the Virginia game where he got hurt, they lost five of their next seven. The injury happened just as they were going into the most difficult part of their schedule – #2 Virginia, #3 Carolina, at Wake, #6 Memphis, at Maryland. Maybe they would have lost those games anyway, but it seems that the injury put them on the ropes, and they got decked, and before they could get up, they got decked again.
After that, they had a easier four-game stretch: Georgia Tech, Furman, The Citadel, Clemson. It gave them a chance to breathe, to regain some confidence, and to figure out who they really were with Ernie Myers playing instead of Whit. They lost a one-point game to Notre Dame, walloped UNC Wilmington, and then came one of the turning points: a home win over Carolina. Two games later, Whittenburg was back.
Incorporating a college basketball player who was out for a long time is such tricky business. I wrote about this with 2011 Duke and Kyrie Irving. Basketball is such a flow sport. Success depends on knowing your teammates’ strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies, and being able to anticipate. There are only five on the floor at a time. They get to know each other really well. When you play a lot of games with a particular group, they develop a kind of intimacy, if I can use that term. Then suddenly the returning player shows up, and things are different. Playing time changes. Egos are affected. Teammates have to adjust to the new player’s tendencies, and vice versa. There is limited time to do this in practice in the middle of a season. In the worst case, it can cause the team to spiral downward. Subtraction by addition. In the best case, other players on the team expand their games and gain confidence because they don’t have the missing player to rely on anymore, and when he does return, he’s rejoining a different, and better, team than the one he played on before. The players who lose playing time handle it gracefully, and the team sees the return as an opportunity, not a threat.
The latter scenario seems to be what happened with NC State. Their defense got better, because it had to; they learned that Ernie Myers was a good player, because he had to play; Lowe and Bailey grew as leaders, because of the adversity they faced; and Valvano kept them believing. In the long run, the Whittenburg injury probably made them better. It took them a couple of games to work out the kinks after he came back, but they exploded on Wake Forest in that 130-89 beatdown in the last game of the regular season, and it was on.
I don’t know what would’ve happened had Whittenburg not gotten hurt. My guess is, they would’ve won enough to hang around the Top 20. I think that’s about who they were, like a #15 in the country kind of team. But the injury made them better. After he came back, I think they were legitimately one of the ten best teams in the country. Some of these games were still upsets, don’t get me wrong, but this was a better team than 1985 Villanova, 1988 Kansas, or 2014 UConn.
The second thing I want to say about this team is that Jim Valvano was a damn good coach. Look at how he managed the Whittenburg situation – masterful. They came out of it better than they went into it. Look at the in-game tactics and adjustments – the junk defenses, the strategic fouling, taking advantage of matchups. Assistant Tom Abatemarco always said Valvano was the best game coach he ever saw – better than Carnesecca, better than Pitino. I always thought that was just talk, but now I think I believe it.
He was the anti-Dean Smith. Smith was the measured analytical genius, obsessive about details and preparation, data-driven before that was a thing, a meticulous planner who left nothing to chance with the entire program. Every action, every word, every decision was calculated, purposeful, guarded. He believed that if he did all the little things right, the big things would take care of themselves. He was probably the most thorough coach of all time. Valvano was the impassioned, artistic, semi-tortured genius, wore his heart on his sleeve, master improviser, master motivator, extemporizer, amateur psychologist, always questioning himself, never comfortable, erratic, unpredictable, brilliant. He was too inconstant to build a program like North Carolina’s. The program, like the man, was destined for the highest highs and the lowest lows. And to never, ever, be boring.
If I had a program to build, and I wanted to maximize the overall excellence of that program, I think Dean Smith is the greatest coach of all time for that. But if I had one game to win, I’m taking Valvano.