Tag: ACC

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

I think there is a good argument that Coach K’s 1982 recruiting class of Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, David Henderson, and Jay Bilas is the best class in ACC history.  Here is what they accomplished:

Year 1: 11-17 (3-11)

Year 2: 24-10 (7-7), ACC Tournament finals, lost in first round of NCAA

Year 3: 23-8 (8-6), ACC Tournament semifinals, lost in second round of NCAA

Year 4: 37-3 (12-2), ACC Tournament champs, lost in national championship

While there are classes that might have more in the way of accomplishments, I think three things set this class apart:

1. Where they started vs. where they finished.  They took the program from the bottom to the top in 3 years.
2. All four guys played for all four years.
3. It really was those four guys who got it done.  OK, Amaker contributed, throw in a little Dan Meagher and Danny Ferry, but the backbone of that 1986 team was those same four guys.

This would be unthinkable now.  Can you imagine four guys playing together for four years and elevating a program like this?  It would never happen.  Can you imagine how much Duke fans must have loved these four?  It shows you what college basketball has lost with all the roster turnover that happens nowadays.

What are some of the other best recruiting classes in terms of their accomplishments?  Here are some that come to mind.

• Duke 1997 (Brand, Battier, Avery)
• Duke 1999 (Williams, Dunleavy, Boozer)
• Duke 2002 (Redick, Williams)
• Duke 2007 (Singler, Smith, Scheyer)
• Maryland 1971 (McMillen, Elmore)
• UNC 1958 (Larese, Moe)
• UNC 1993 (Stackhouse, Wallace)
• UNC 1995 (Jamison, Carter)
• NC State 1953 (Shavlik, Molodet)
• NC State 1956 (Pucillo, Richter)
• NC State 1987 (Corchiani, Monroe)
• South Carolina 1968 (Roche, Owens)
• Wake Forest 1990 (Childress, Rogers)

I don’t think any of those can match the 1982 Duke class in terms of taking a program from the bottom to the top.

Now, back to Johnny Dawkins.  Johnny Dawkins, to me, is the epitome of all-around excellence in a basketball player.  From the day he stepped on the court, he did everything with excellence.  Excellent shooter.  Excellent passer.  Excellent defender.  Good rebounder at the guard position.  Good perimeter shooter, good penetrator, good finisher.  Made free throws.  Great leader.  Fine human being.  All-ACC.  All-American.  National Player of the Year, according to some.  ACC Tournament MOP.

All he lacks on his resume is a national championship and ACC Player of the Year.  For the first, he came up 3 points short.  For the second, he couldn’t overcome the greatness of Len Bias.  But there is nothing negative to say about Johnny Dawkins, as a ballplayer or as a person.

Have you ever looked at how great he was in the 1986 postseason?  In nine games – three in the ACC Tournament, six in the NCAA Tournament, all wins except the last – here’s what he did:

Game	Opponent	Result	Shooting	Points
ACC Quarters	Wake Forest	W, 68-60	8-14	16
ACC Semis	Virginia	W, 75-70	9-17	24
ACC Final	Georgia Tech	W, 68-67	7-14	20
NCAA First Round	Miss. Valley State	W, 85-78	11-17	27
NCAA Second Round	Old Dominion	W, 89-61	10-12	25
NCAA Sweet 16	DePaul	W, 74-67	11-20	25
NCAA Elite 8	Navy	W, 71-50	13-25	28
NCAA Final Four	Kansas	W, 71-67	11-17	24
NCAA Champ Game	Louisville	L, 72-69	10-19	24
Averages	59.4%	23.7

To have eight consecutive games with 20+ points and 50%+ shooting, in tournament play, as a guard… it would be hard to find another example.  This performance is right up there with the greatest NCAA Tournament performances in history.  It’s not remembered as such, simply because they didn’t win.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

I did not expect to find that Shane Battier was a Top 15 player.  But as I look at his accomplishments, I am forced to that conclusion.  His senior year in 2001 is one of the great years anybody ever had.  He was ACC Player of the Year, National Player of the Year, NABC Defensive Player of the Year, ACC Tournament Most Outstanding Player, NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player, and won a national championship.  I’d say that about covers it…

But that’s not all.  He was also NABC Defensive Player of the Year and a second team All-American as a junior.  The teams he played on had an overall record of 135-15, 59-5 in the ACC.  His teams went 11-1 in the ACC Tournament.  He is the only player in ACC history with 200 blocks and 200 steals.  His 2001 NCAA Tournament performance is one of the greatest ever by an ACC player.

One of the reasons for lingering doubts about Battier’s greatness is that, as I remember, he was considered a bit of a disappointment as a freshman and sophomore.  He came in as a very hyped recruit, and while he played an important role on those 1998 and 1999 teams, he clearly played a supporting role to Trajan Langdon and Elton Brand.  He was always a tremendous defender, but he wasn’t a prolific scorer, so there was a sense of “what’s with all the hype about this guy?”.  But with the departures of Brand, Langdon, Will Avery, and Corey Maggette after 1999, Battier showed that he could score, in addition to everything else he did well, and that 2000 team didn’t miss a beat.

Battier, Jason Williams, and Joseph Forte were the top three vote-getters on the 2001 AP All-America team.  As far as I can tell, that is the only time in the history of that award that the top three were from the same conference.

Battier is probably the only player in college basketball history to play in four NCAA tournaments as a #1 seed.  I can’t find another.  Gonzaga would have been a #1 in four straight tournaments had it not been for the 2020 COVID cancellation.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

Sam Perkins is probably the best player in the history of college basketball who was never the best player on his own team.  He was overshadowed by James Worthy and Michael Jordan, but he was a great player in his own right – First Team All-ACC three times, Consensus First Team All-American twice.  Perkins never came close to winning ACC Player of the Year, as he had the misfortune to play at the same time as Jordan and Ralph Sampson.

Perkins in 1982 and 1983 fell victim to the anti-ACC bias shown by the AP that I have written about elsewhere.  Notice how the AP is out of step with the other services:

Vote	1982	1983	1984
AP	Nothing	3rd team	1st team
USBWA	2nd team	1st team	1st team
NABC	2nd team	2nd team	2nd team
UPI	2nd team	1st team	1st team
Consensus	2nd team	1st team	1st team

Freshmen to be named Most Outstanding Player of the ACC Tournament:

• Phil Ford, UNC, 1975
• Sam Perkins, UNC, 1981
• Jerry Stackhouse, UNC, 1994
• Jason Williams, Duke, 2000
• Brandan Wright, UNC, 2007
• Zion Williamson, Duke, 2019

Perkins was a forerunner of the modern European-style big man with great perimeter shooting touch.  He was one of the first big guys to be a proficient 3-point shooter at the NBA level.  He is the only player in ACC history with 2000 points, 1000 rebounds, 200 blocks, and 100 steals.

My friend Todd thinks that Perkins shouldn’t be ahead of Lennie Rosenbluth and Larry Miller.  It’s certainly arguable either way, but there are two main reasons I put Perkins ahead, and I’ve already mentioned them.  One is, he was a three-time All-American.  If you want to devalue that because he didn’t do as well in AP voting, OK, but I go the other way, for reasons I’ve already explained.

The other reason is, Perkins played at the same time as Sampson and Jordan.  So that pretty much eliminated any chance to be the best player in the conference.  That’s a unique set of circumstances.  No other player on this list is blocked behind two Top 10 players.  With all due respect to Larry Miller, he was competing with Bob Verga and Mike Lewis for ACC honors.  Rosenbluth’s main competition was Grady Wallace. It’s not the same.  Think about it this way: if Miller or Rosenbluth had played when Perkins did, what more do you think they would have accomplished than Perkins did?  Would they have won ACC Player of the Year over Sampson and Jordan?  Would they have done better than Perkins did in All-America or All-ACC voting?  I don’t think so.

It is true that Perkins never had that signature moment.  He was ACC Tournament MOP as a freshman, but it’s not like he scored 40 points or made a game-winning shot.  He was just his normal efficient, excellent self for three games.  That was the pattern of his entire career: quiet, efficient excellence for 135 games.  There’s a reason his teams went 117-21 and made it to two national finals.  Obviously, Worthy and Jordan had a lot to do with that, but Perkins was the constant.  Miller and Rosenbluth had brighter moments than Perkins, but if you look at the overall body of work… I just think Perkins is a little bit better.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

Coming into the 1996 season, Carolina had a lot of question marks.  Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, and Donald Williams were gone from the 1995 Final Four team.  Jeff McInnis and Dante Calabria were the only returning starters.  Shammond Williams and Serge Zwikker hadn’t shown much.  But as usual, Dean Smith had a stellar recruiting class of Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, and Ademola Okulaja.  Carter was most highly touted of the group, making all the prep All-America teams.  But once the season started, it became apparent that Jamison was the star.

He played his way onto first team All-ACC as a freshman, one point ahead of Maryland’s Johnny Rhodes.  At the time, he was just the fourth freshman to receive that honor, the first three being Clemson’s Skip Wise, Georgia Tech’s Kenny Anderson, and Maryland’s Joe Smith.  But he didn’t stop there.  Jamison continued to expand his game, improving his free throw shooting, developing more of a perimeter game, and increasing his scoring totals.  By 1998, he was the best player in the country, making Bill Guthridge look like a genius and leading the Tar Heels to their second straight Final Four.  (ACC teams that won the ACC Tournament and made the Final Four in back-to-back years: 1963-64 Duke; 1967-68-69 UNC; 1981-82 UNC; 1997-98 UNC)

The first thing you noticed about Jamison was his unorthodox style.  He bounced around like a pogo stick out there, flipping up shots from all sorts of angles, but it seemed that all of them went in.  He was half a step and half a jump quicker than everybody else. He once scored 35 points against Duke and had the ball in his hands for a total of 53 seconds. He made himself into a shooter, progressing from a 53% free-throw shooter as a freshman to one of the top 100 three-point shooters in NBA history in terms of three-point FGs made.

Jamison as a collegian has a very similar career profile to Jason Williams.  Both three-year players; both were National Player of the Year as a junior.  Jamison I think was a little better as a freshman.  I guess you could argue that Williams was a little better as a sophomore; he was a first team All-American while Jamison was second team.  Ultimately, it’s a coin flip.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a player who has the sense of presence on the court that Antawn has. His feel, his sixth sense – all of that is unprecedented. You could almost spin him like a top, blindfold him, and throw him the ball. He could shoot without looking, and it would go in. – Dave Odom, quoted in What It Means to Be a Tar Heel by Scott Fowler

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

McGuire didn’t do a lot of Xs and Os. We didn’t run plays. We just played schoolyard basketball. – Rosenbluth in What It Means to Be a Tar Heel

With apologies to Dickie Hemric and Ronnie Shavlik, Lennie Rosenbluth was the best ACC player of the 1950s.  He was the first three-time All-ACC player.  He was the first ACC player to be named first team All-America.  And of course he had that magical 1957 season where he was ACC Player of the Year, ACC Tournament Most Outstanding Player, and led the Tar Heels to the national championship.

Rosenbluth’s ACC Tournament performance that year is worth dwelling on.  In the Tar Heels’ three victories, he had 45, 23, and 38 points, for a total of 106.  That record stood until 1995 when Randolph Childress got 107.  His 45 points in the first round is still the single-game tournament scoring record.  His 38 points in the final was surpassed only by Charlie Scott’s 40 in 1969.  Rosenbluth’s performance was every bit as good in its time as Childress’ was in his.

There are a lot of national player of the year awards now, but in 1957, there were only two that I can find: the UPI and the Helms Foundation.  The UPI Player of the Year Award went to Chet Forte of Columbia, while the Helms Foundation award went to Rosenbluth.  Had the AP had an award, it seems likely based on All-America voting that it would have gone to Wilt Chamberlain.  All that to say, Chamberlain, Rosenbluth, and Forte were the three best players in the country.

If “Helms Foundation” sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen it on a banner hanging up in the Dean Dome.  I never took the time to investigate what kind of organization it is or was until now.  Here’s an interesting article.  The gist of it seems to be that the Helms “Foundation” selections were essentially the product of one person who was a big sports fan.  The selections from the earliest years such as North Carolina’s mythical 1924 “national championship” were done retroactively, as the Helms Foundation wasn’t founded until 1936.  So I think it casts some doubt on the credibility of these selections.

Would Rosenbluth be on Carolina’s all-time starting five?  Boy, that is a tough one.  The guards are easy (Ford and Jordan) and the center is easy (Hansbrough).  But the forwards?  Pick two from this list: Rosenbluth, Larry Miller, Sam Perkins, and Antawn Jamison.  If you pin me down, I’m probably going with Perkins and Rosenbluth.  When Billy Cunningham and James Worthy can’t crack your school’s second team all-time starting five, you know you’re an elite program.

From the first NCAA Tournament in 1939 through 1976, there were seven national championship teams who went undefeated: San Francisco in 1956; UNC in 1957; UCLA in 1964, 1967, 1972, and 1973; and Indiana in 1976.  It has not happened since then.  In fact, there hasn’t even been a one loss national champion.  There is no obvious (to me) reason why this should be the case.  Of course, it is very, very difficult to go undefeated, so perhaps we should turn the question around and ask how it happened seven times during that 38-year period?  Four of those teams were UCLA teams, and that 10-year period for UCLA is something unique in the history of college basketball, and seemingly not repeatable.  But even if we dismiss that as an outlier, we still have the other three.  Teams do play more games now, so that by itself decreases the chances of an undefeated season, but it’s not that big of a difference.  My guess is that what looks like a pattern is mostly due to chance.  There is no reason that a modern team couldn’t go undefeated the way that Indiana did in 1976 or UNC did in 1957.  1984 Georgetown, 1992 Duke, and 2012 Kentucky could have gone undefeated had the balls bounced a little differently.  I predict that within the next 20 years, we’ll see another undefeated team in college basketball.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

Jason Williams, what a player.  I remember those Duke teams.  You felt like you had no chance to beat them, and you were right.  I especially remember the 2002 ACC Tournament final, which I was fortunate enough to attend.  NC State was coming off a huge win over eventual national champion Maryland in the semifinal.  Duke absolutely blew their doors off in a 91-61 win.  That was actually closer than their previous meeting, a 108-71 Duke win.  That 2002 Duke team was the only team in the 21 years of kenpom ratings to be both the best offensive and defensive team in the country.  I still have no idea how they lost to Indiana in the Sweet 16.  I had forgotten what happened at the end of that game.  Duke was down by four, and Williams buried a three… and got fouled… and missed the free throw.  Carlos Boozer got the rebound, probably got fouled on the putback but it wasn’t called, and that was the ballgame.

Here’s a stat.  Williams played for three years.  Guess what his record was against State, Carolina, and Wake?  23-1.  I don’t know how I would prove this without a lot of painstaking manual work, but it’s hard to imagine that anybody else in ACC history had a .958 winning percentage against the rest of the Big Four.

Looking at Williams’ accolades, a couple of things stand out.  He came in at the same time as UNC’s Joseph Forte, and through their first two years, I think you’d have to say that Forte was ahead by a nose.  He edged out Williams 48-43 in ACC Rookie of the Year voting, and did a bit better in All-ACC voting as well.  The next year, Williams, Forte, and Shane Battier were all unanimous first-team All-ACC, and they were the top three vote-getters for AP All-American as well.  But Battier and Forte each received 32 votes for ACC Player of the Year, with Williams getting 8.  In AP National Player of the Year voting, Williams and Forte finished tied for third behind Battier and Jamaal Tinsley of Iowa State.  In Wooden Award voting, Williams and Forte finished second and third behind Battier.

In 2002, Forte was in the NBA and Williams won National Player of the Year.  Williams did not, however, win ACC Player of the Year, as that honor went to Juan Dixon by a narrow margin.

To summarize, Williams was a two-time first team All-American and a National Player of the Year.  For me, that means automatic Top 20.  Williams is the only major conference player in college basketball with multiple 20+ point, 5+ assist seasons in the past 30 years.  He never lost an ACC Tournament game.  He is one of six freshmen to be named Most Outstanding Player of the ACC Tournament (the others are Phil Ford, Sam Perkins, Jerry Stackhouse, Brandan Wright, and Zion Williamson).  He is one of six three-year players to reach 2,000 career points (the others are David Thompson, Len Chappell, Lennie Rosenbluth, Charlie Scott, and Dennis Scott).

It’s fascinating (if fruitless) to speculate about what Williams’ NBA career would have been like.  He didn’t have a great rookie year, but you have to think that with his skill, athletic ability, and IQ, he would’ve eventually been an All-Star caliber player.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

It’s hard to remember that there was a time when Mike Krzyzewski was not the coach at Duke, but Mike Gminski remembers.  He played in the last four years of the Bill Foster era.  Foster was hired in 1974, inheriting a mess from Neill McGeachy and Bucky Waters.  His first three years, no improvement was evident.  But over a three-year period between 1976 and 1978, Foster added Jim Spanarkel, Gminski, Gene Banks, and Kenny Dennard, and in 1978 everything suddenly came together.  After going 2-10 in the ACC the previous year, the Devils got national attention by beating second-ranked UNC in January, went on to finish second in the ACC regular season, and ran through the ACC Tournament to claim the title.  Suddenly the Devils were a Top 10 team, and they rode that momentum all the way to the national championship game, where they lost to top-ranked Kentucky. 

The next year, with everyone back, plus heralded recruit Vince Taylor, the Blue Devils were preseason #1.  But as so often happens in sports, the next step was never taken.  Duke stumbled out of the gate, ripped off 11 out of 12 to get to 17-3, then dropped 3 more games down the stretch.  Still ranked #6 going into the NCAA Tournament, they were matched up with a St. John’s team that had already beaten them in the regular season. This time, the Blue Devils were without the injured Bob Bender and Kenny Dennard, and the Redmen pulled out a two-point win. Just like that, the Devils were done.

Despite the loss of Spanarkel, the Devils were preseason #3 going into Gminski’s senior season.  They got to #1 after wins over #2 Kentucky and #6 UNC, but again stumbled in ACC play, culminating in a 4-game losing streak in February that saw their ranking dip to #17.  But they pulled it together for an incredible 3-game run during the ACC Tournament.  However, before the NCAA Tournament began, Foster announced that he was leaving Duke to go to South Carolina.  He continued coaching through the NCAA Tournament, and the team responded well, winning their first game, then beating Kentucky at Rupp Arena in the Sweet 16.  But in the regional final, they lost to Joe Barry Carroll and the Purdue Boilermakers, and that’s how it ended for the G-Man.

Gminski had a great career.  Turned around a program, went to the national championship game, won 2 ACC Tournaments, ACC Player of the Year as a junior.  As a senior, Gminski statistically was even better, but Duke as a team was viewed as a disappointment, and POY went to Albert King of regular season champion Maryland.  He was a walking double-double and, with Tyler Hansbrough, is one of two players in the Top 10 in ACC career scoring and rebounding.  He was Consensus First Team All-American as a junior, and second team as a senior (which was bogus, as I wrote about here). Gminski was a rare recruiting misjudgment by Dean Smith, who thought he was too slow to be successful.

A lesser known skill of Gminski’s was not fouling.  In his ACC career, he committed only 240 fouls, a remarkably low number for a big man who played pretty much every minute of every game for 4 years.  In his NBA career, he played 938 games and fouled out exactly once.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

John Lucas made only one mistake in his career, and that was playing at the same time as David Thompson.  He arrived at Maryland in 1972 in the first year of freshman eligibility and plugged right in to the Len Elmore/Tom McMillen Terrapins, leading them to a #2 national ranking.  But they went 0-3 against NC State, including a two-point loss in the ACC Tournament final.  But because of NC State’s probation, the Terrapins received a bid to the NCAA Tournament anyway, where they lost to fourth-ranked Providence in a regional final.

The next season, the Terps reached #2 again and lost a total of five games all season: the season opener to #1 UCLA; at UNC; and three more games against NC State, including the so-called “Greatest Game of All Time” in the ACC, the 103-100 overtime ACC Tournament final.  The Terps were undoubtedly one of the five best teams in the country, but they stayed home in March.

The next season, Elmore and McMillen were gone, but Maryland didn’t miss a beat.  The Terps again reached #2 nationally, losing only three games during the regular season, and finally beat NC State, twice.  But Maryland found themselves matched up with the Wolfpack again in the ACC Tournament semifinals, and for the third straight year, Thompson and the Wolfpack sent the Terps home disappointed.  The good news is that the NCAA Tournament started taking at large teams, so they did make the tourney, losing to third-ranked Louisville in the regional final.

In 1976, with Thompson finally gone to the NBA, Maryland again reached #2 nationally for the fourth consecutive year.  And the ACC Tournament, after being staged at Greensboro Coliseum for many years, was finally moved to the Terrapins’ backyard in the Capital Centre.  But they couldn’t take advantage, falling to Virginia in the tournament semifinal. The Cavaliers went on to beat North Carolina in the final, becoming arguably the most unlikely ACC Tournament winner ever.

Few teams in basketball history had so little to show for so much.  No ACC titles, no Final Fours.  And yet, you can’t really say much negative about their team.  They were a great team, with great players; they just didn’t have David Thompson.  That’s really it.  The two times they did make it to the NCAA Tournament, they got a couple of really tough regional final draws.  I don’t think there was really any defect in their team.  If the ball had bounced differently for them, we would remember them as one of college basketball’s great teams.

For Lucas, perhaps more than any other player, there was a huge discrepancy between how he was regarded nationally, and how he was regarded locally.  It makes him very difficult to rank.  Nationally, he is often spoken of as one of the best players in ACC history.  In the Grant Hill post, I referenced the 2009 ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia, in which Lucas is named one of the 50 greatest college basketball players of all time and is the 10th ACC player listed.  Lucas’ All-America record is very impressive and would support that.

But he didn’t do nearly as well in All-ACC voting.  Don’t get me wrong, he was first team All-ACC three times, which isn’t terrible; but he never finished higher than third in the voting, and he never received serious consideration for ACC Player of the Year.  Obviously David Thompson had that locked down in 1974 and 1975, but why didn’t Lucas do better in 1976?  Let’s compare him to Mitch Kupchak.  That’s a convenient comparison since they were both in the Class of 1976.

Year	Lucas	Kupchak
1974	242 points, 1st team, 3rd overall	Nothing
1975	215 points, 1st team, 4th overall	252 points, 1st team, 3rd overall
1976	282 points, 1st team, 4th overall	310 points, 1st team, 1st overall, ACC POY

Who would you say has the more impressive record there?  I guess you could argue either way, but that’s the point.  We’re talking about whether Lucas was better than Mitch Kupchak, who was a fine player, but won’t be on anyone’s list of 50 greatest players in college basketball history.  If all we had to go on in evaluating Lucas was his All-ACC voting record, he’d be in the 50s or 60s, somewhere around where Kupchak is.

But Lucas in 1975 and 1976 did great in All-America balloting, finishing ahead of the same guys who were ahead of him in All-ACC.  In 1975, he finished well behind Skip Brown and Kupchak in All-ACC, but he was first/second team All-America while Brown and Kupchak were nowhere to be found.  In 1976, he finished behind Kupchak, Kenny Carr, and Phil Ford in All-ACC, but he was first team All-America, ahead of those same guys.

It’s confusing, and I don’t have a good explanation for it.  Typically, I trust the ACC voters more than the national voters, but somehow in this instance, I feel a little differently.  Lucas’s teams went 92-23 over his 4 years.  Maryland was still really good in 1975 and 1976, after Elmore and McMillen graduated, and Lucas was the unquestioned leader of those teams.  It’s hard for me to believe that he was the fourth-best player in the conference each of those years.  I’m not going all in and calling him one of the 50 greatest players in college basketball history, but I’m going to lean more towards him being one of the all-time greats.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

People need to understand, Larry was the winner who made Coach Smith a winner.  Like Bill Russell started the Boston Celtics tradition, Larry Miller is the tradition that Carolina talks about.  Everything starts with him.  – Charlie Scott

And to be specific, it started in 1967.  That’s when it all came together for the Tar Heels, in Dean Smith’s sixth year.  Senior Bob Lewis, junior Miller, and sophomores Rusty Clark, Dick Grubar, and Bill Bunting led the Tar Heels to the ACC regular season championship, Smith’s first ACC Tournament championship, and the Final Four.  It was the first of three straight seasons in which the Tar Heels claimed all three of those honors, an incredible achievement that may never be matched.

Miller’s 1967 ACC Tournament was one of the best ever.  He famously scored 29 points in the second half in the semifinal against Wake Forest to lead the Tar Heels to a comeback win, then followed it up with 32 points on 13-for-14 shooting and 11 rebounds in the final to knock off Vic Bubas’ Blue Devils.  He was named a second team All-American and, on the back of his ACC Tournament performance, edged out Duke’s Bob Verga 52-48 to win ACC Player of the Year.

Miller was even better in 1968, leading the Tar Heels (who lost Lewis but added Charlie Scott) to a 28-4 record and an appearance in the national final where they fell to Lew Alcindor and UCLA.  Miller won ACC Player of the Year again, more convincingly this time, 76-34 over Duke’s Mike Lewis.  And he was named first team All-America by the Associated Press.  Look at who else was on the team:

• Lew Alcindor
• Elvin Hayes
• Pete Maravich
• Wes Unseld
• Larry Miller

Larry Miller and four NBA Hall of Famers.  Not bad.  Miller wasn’t a Hall of Famer, but did you know that he holds the ABA record for most points in a game (67), playing for the Carolina Cougars?

So when you think of the all-time greats at Carolina, think of Ford, and Jordan, and Hansbrough, yes, but also think of Larry Miller.  He’s the one who started it all.

2003 Top 50 List: Yes

Dan Collins List: Yes

Juan Dixon was a highly regarded recruit from Calvert Hall in Baltimore in the Class of 1997.  He enrolled at Maryland in the fall of 1997, but he didn’t make the SAT score needed to play basketball until November, by which point he had missed a couple of months of practice.  As a result, Gary Williams decided to redshirt Dixon.  Isn’t it funny how things turn out?  As a result of that redshirt, Dixon was a senior in 2002, not 2001.  If Dixon doesn’t redshirt, Maryland probably doesn’t have a national championship banner hanging up.

Dixon had about as close to a storybook career as you can get.  As mentioned, he redshirted his first year.  Then in 1999, he played only 15 minutes per game and averaged 7.4 points.  While there were signs – if you do the math, you’ll realize that 7.4 points in 15 minutes is pretty good – he hadn’t really made an impact.  He didn’t crack the ACC All-Freshman team, finishing behind such notables as UNC’s Kris Lang and NC State’s Adam Harrington.  There was no indication that he was going to be a great player.  Nowadays a guy like that would probably transfer (why must we always say “enter the transfer portal”?), but Dixon saw an opportunity with the departures of Terrell Stokes and Steve Francis.  And boy did he take advantage.  In 2000 Dixon led the Terrapins in scoring with 18 points per game and played his way right onto first team All-ACC, just ahead of teammates Lonny Baxter and Terence Morris.  Maryland finished second in the ACC and ranked 17^th nationally.

From there, Dixon just kept getting better and so did the Terrapins.  The 2001 team made a great run to Maryland’s first ever Final Four, dominating #1 seed Stanford in the regional final before losing to Duke in an All-ACC semifinal.  They returned everyone except Morris in 2002, and we know what happened.  The Terrapins went 15-1 in the ACC, Dixon won ACC Player of the Year in a very close vote over Jason Williams, and Maryland cut down the nets in Atlanta as national champions in Dixon’s final college game, with Dixon named Most Outstanding Player of the tournament.

That’s some career, isn’t it?  Five years, going from a redshirt year through continuous improvement to a National Champion / First Team All-American / ACC Player of the Year / MOP of the NCAA Tournament senior year.  I don’t think there’s anything to compare to it, really.

I previously listed Dixon’s tournament performance as one of the all-time greats. It’s right up there with Laettner 1991, Thompson 1974, May 2005, and Battier 2011.  If you said Dixon’s was the best NCAA Tournament performance ever by an ACC player, I wouldn’t argue with you.  Much.

Notable players who cut down the nets as national champions in their final game as a senior:

• Lennie Rosenbluth, 1957
• Tom Burleson, 1974
• Christian Laettner, 1992
• George Lynch, 1993
• Shane Battier, 2001
• Dixon and Lonny Baxter, 2002
• Tyler Hansbrough, 2009
• Jon Scheyer, 2010

Most Points in a Single NCAA Tournament, ACC Players Only:

1. Juan Dixon, 2002 – 155
2. Jason Williams, 2001 – 154
3. Johnny Dawkins, 1986 – 153