Record: 25-3, 14-0 (1st place)
ACC Tournament: Lost in final
NCAA Tournament: Did not make it
Final AP Ranking: 6
All-ACC Players: John Roche (ACC POY), Tom Owens (1st)
All-Americans: John Roche (2nd)
South Carolina’s last two years in the ACC were its best two. While the 1971 team won the ACC Tournament and the 1970 team did not, overall I think the 1970 team was better. They were a reflection of coach Frank McGuire – a bunch of brash, tough, in-your-face New Yorkers who didn’t care what you thought about them. Big men Tom Owens and Tom Riker owned the glass, ACC Player of the Year John Roche was the leading scorer and emotional leader, and Bobby Cremins was the scrappy, ball-hawking point guard.
McGuire brought the exact same New York pipeline recruiting strategy to South Carolina that he had used at North Carolina. Other programs had pipelines as well, but McGuire took it to the extreme. I don’t have data on every player, but for the players I do have, I found only one (Rick Aydlett) who wasn’t from New York. Owens, Riker, Roche, Cremins, Kevin Joyce, John Ribock, Bobby Carver… all from New York. And the same was true of his North Carolina teams. In the days before national recruiting databases, coaches relied on their network of local scouts to find good players and their credibility within that local community to attract them. Nobody ever did that better than Coach McGuire.
A difficulty with ranking the 1970 team is that they didn’t play a great schedule. Their only marquee non-conference game was a neutral court matchup against Austin Carr-led Notre Dame. The Gamecocks survived an overtime thriller, “holding” Carr to 43 points. The ACC that year was good, but not what it would become two or three years later. North Carolina still had Charlie Scott but came down a tick after reaching the Final Four the previous three years. NC State was solid, and Duke was hanging on to post-Bubas respectability. But it was still the ACC, and if you look at the results, South Carolina didn’t just go 14-0, they dominated those games. They had only one close ACC game all year, a two-point win at NC State. They won every other ACC game by 10+ points. The only blemishes on their record were a one-point early season loss against Tennessee and a midseason defeat at the hands of nationally-ranked and Terry Holland-coached Davidson.
In fact, the Gamecocks had so thoroughly dominated the league that going into the Tournament, teams clearly felt they had to try something different. And as had been the case several times in prior years, that thing was the slowdown. In the first round, South Carolina took on Clemson, a team they had beaten by 21 and 47 in the regular season. This time, the Tigers held the ball, and the Gamecocks barely survived a 34-33 nail-biter. The semifinal against Wake Forest was relatively easy, but ACC Player of the Year John Roche suffered an ankle injury late in the game which was to loom large in the final against NC State. The Wolfpack also employed slowdown tactics, and with Roche slowed by the ankle, NC State managed to eke out a 42-39 double overtime win. And since the ACC sent only one team to the NCAA Tournament at that time, the Gamecocks’ season was over.
Defensive statistics from 1970 are scarce, but based on the information we do have, this appears to be one of the greatest defensive teams of this (or perhaps any) era. The Gamecocks held opponents to 38% from the floor and led the nation in fewest fouls committed with 13.8 per game. They had a huge advantage from the line, making 67 more free throws than their opponents attempted. They appear to have been an exceptional rebounding team as well, which makes sense with the twin towers Owens and Riker in the middle. Owens led the league in rebounds per game all three of his years on varsity.
I want to riff on that foul point to illustrate something important. Many fans do not fully appreciate the importance of getting to the free throw line on offense, and not sending the opponents to the foul line on defense. Let’s try to quantify why this is so important.
It has become more-or-less accepted wisdom in modern basketball analysis that the essential measure of how good a team is on offense or defense is points per possession (or, as it is more commonly expressed, points per 100 possessions). You’ll see this statistic routinely on kenpom.com, barttorvik.com, basketball-reference.com, nba.com, and other modern basketball stats sites. In fact, if you want to know how kenpom and barttorvik rank teams, this is how. Their ratings are essentially points per 100 possessions on offense minus points per 100 possessions on defense, adjusted for strength of schedule. They don’t match perfectly, which I infer is because they have slight differences in how they adjust for strength of schedule.
In college, an elite offense is around 120 points per 100 possessions. A terrible offense is around 90. That’s the difference between elite and terrible.
Now let’s think about that in the context of free throws. Let’s say your team shoots 70% from the line, and as a simplifying assumption, assume that every player shoots 70% individually. For 2-shot fouls, your expected points (or long-run average, if you prefer) from those possessions is (0.7 x 2) = 1.4 points. On a 3-shot foul (the best play in basketball for an offense) you would expect to average (0.7 x 3) = 2.1 points per possession. (It’s actually a tiny bit higher than that with the possibility that you get an offensive rebound off a missed free throw and then score, but we’ll ignore that for this argument.) Considering an elite offense averages 1.2 points per possession, 1.4 is out of this world good. If you had a team that averaged 1.4 points per possession for a season, it would be the greatest offense in the history of college basketball.
Even a 1-and-1 for a 70% shooter has an expected value of 1.19 points per possession – still at elite offense level. If you could somehow get a 1-and-1 for a 70% shooter on every possession, your offense would be among the best in the country.
Dean Smith used to say that one of the reason he didn’t like to take the first available shot is that it doesn’t give the defense a chance to foul you. This is why. Because Dean Smith was a math whiz, and he understood the numbers.
Now let’s apply this to 1970 South Carolina. The Gamecocks shot 297 more free throws than their opponents. Let’s round it to 300 for ease of calculation. And, again for ease of calculation, let’s assume those 300 extra free throws came from 150 possessions that ended in 2-shot fouls, or about 5.3 possessions per game. Think of it as 5.3 possessions per game for each team where the Gamecocks were getting to the line and their opponents weren’t.
Now, South Carolina shot right at 70% as a team, so that means that on those 5.3 possessions, they would expect to get (5.3 x 1.4) = 7.42 points. Now let’s look at the corresponding 5.3 possessions for their opponents. South Carolina had a great defense, so let’s estimate they allowed 0.9 points per possession. That means their opponents were generating (5.3 x 0.9) = 4.77 points.
So to summarize, South Carolina’s 297 extra free throw attempts amounted to a 7.42 – 4.77 = 2.65 points per game advantage over their opponents. Their overall average margin of victory was 16.6 points per game. That means that nearly 20% of their overall margin of victory was the result of getting to the line so much more than their opponents.
I hope that helps illustrate why it’s so important to draw fouls and to avoid committing them. It’s not the most important thing, but it is an underappreciated advantage of many great teams. Few did it better than the 1970 Gamecocks.