Tag: ACC

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: Yes (all 3)

[Pucillo] shows me something different every time I see him play. He’s always thinking one step ahead of everyone else on the court. – Everett Case, quoted in Legends of NC State Basketball by Tim Peeler

Pete Brennan, Lou Pucillo, and Lee Shaffer form a cluster of players who are very hard to distinguish.  You could throw John Richter and perhaps Tommy Kearns in there too, but I think Richter and Kearns are a notch below the other three.  Each was ACC Player of the Year, in 1958, 1959, and 1960 respectively.  Each received similar All-American support as a senior, making some second teams and some third teams.

Pucillo was one of the greatest little guys ever, standing at 5’9″. He was a brilliant ball handler and a bit of a hot dog who was the perfect quarterback for the up tempo style that Everett Case wanted to play. Pucillo hardly played high school basketball at all. His big break came playing for Temple Prep after high school, when Vic Bubas happened to see him playing against the Philadelphia School for the Blind (who presumably weren’t on the basketball team) and Deaf.

Brennan, of course, played a major role on North Carolina’s 1957 national championship team, but he wasn’t the best player, or probably even the second best; Rosenbluth and Kearns made first team All-ACC, while Brennan made second team.

I’m going to rank them Pucillo, Brennan, Shaffer.  I’m putting Pucillo at the head of the group for two reasons.  One, he was ACC Tournament MVP in 1959; two, he made first team All-ACC twice.  Brennan and Shaffer did not.  But they really could be listed in any order.  They are so close that I’m keeping them together in my rankings.

Did you know that Shaffer is the first ACC player who was an NBA All-Star?  Well OK, I’m cheating a little bit.  Gene Shue of Maryland is actually the first, but his last year in college was 1954, so he played only one year in the ACC.  After Shue, it was Lee Shaffer.  After Shaffer came Billy Cunningham, Jeff Mullins, and Jack Marin, and the spell was broken.  Mullins, drafted in 1964, was the first ACC player to have a really good NBA career, unless you count Shue.

It’s a curious phenomenon.  The ACC’s best players had zero success in the NBA prior to the mid-1960s.  Here are the NBA careers of the ACC’s best players and highest draft picks from its first ten seasons:

That’s pretty dismal, isn’t it?  You have one guy, Shue, who had a good career.  You have a couple of guys in Chappell and Dave Budd who had respectable careers.  Chappell, I think, dealt with some injuries that kept him from being as good as he might’ve been.  Shaffer was good for three years, then quit to go into business.  Heyman had a pretty good rookie season with the Knicks, then fell off and was out of the league in three years, although he came back to play some good basketball in the ABA.  Hemric was a role player for two years for the Red Auerbach Celtics teams and won an NBA championship in 1957, but it appears that he fell behind Tom Heinsohn in Auerbach’s pecking order, so he walked away.  And the rest of the players on this list had no career at all to speak of, including Shavlik, Wilkinson, Rosenbluth, Wallace, Brennan, and Pucillo.

Though this initially struck me as surprising, as I’ve thought about it more, it makes a little more sense.  First off, there were only eight teams in the NBA (nine with the addition of the Chicago team in 1962).  So there were very few spots to be had.  With 8 teams, you’re talking about only 40 starting positions, and maybe 60-70 positions with regular playing time.  It was really hard to make it.

Second, there were no teams in the south.  The league was northeastern (Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse, New York), midwestern (Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago), and western (Los Angeles).  And it wasn’t particularly lucrative.  Many players at that time were married, sometimes with a family.  So for a lot of them, it just wasn’t worth it.  It made more sense for them to get a job.

But there were other players from the South who made it.  Bob Pettit from LSU, Bailey Howell from Mississippi State, Hal Greer and Jerry West, if you count West Virginia as the South.  So it wasn’t impossible. 

This is one factor (among many) that leads me to conclude that the quality of play in the ACC wasn’t that great during this period.  The Big Ten, the Big Eight, the PAC-10 predecessors, the Missouri Valley, and arguably the SEC and Southwest Conference were playing better basketball, top to bottom, than the ACC.  I think this was true up until the mid-to-late 1960s.

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: Yes

Joseph Forte is in the pantheon of great “two-and-done” players in ACC history, along with Joe Smith, Kenny Anderson, Elton Brand, Jerry Stackhouse, and Chris Paul.  Don’t let Forte’s lack of NBA success fool you into thinking he doesn’t belong with that group.  In 2000, he was ACC Rookie of the Year over Jason Williams and Steve Blake.  He then led a Tar Heels team that had a mediocre regular season to an unexpected Final Four run, and it was absolutely Forte who made the difference in the regionals, with 22 points in a Sweet 16 win over Tennessee and 28 in a 59-55 win over Tulsa to get to the Final Four.

Then, in his sophomore campaign (also Matt Doherty’s first year), all he did was tie Shane Battier for co-ACC Player of the Year and make first team All-American (along with Battier and Jason Williams) in leading that team to win the ACC regular season and finish sixth in the final AP poll.

It’s not quite up to the level of Smith, Anderson, or Brand, but it’s in the same range as Paul and Stackhouse, and in my view a bit better, because Forte did more as a freshman and just as much as a sophomore.

The 2001 UNC team is a fascinating one.  Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we know what was going to happen to Matt Doherty; but at the time, that was the farthest thing from anyone’s mind.  After a couple of early season losses, the Tar Heels reeled off 18 consecutive wins and stood at 21-2, 11-0 in the ACC and ranked #1 in the country when they took the court at Littlejohn Coliseum on February 18, 2001.  Clemson had lost eight consecutive games, most recently a 34-point drubbing at the hands of lowly NC State, and were on their way to a last place 2-14 ACC finish.  Who could have guessed that it would be that very day that Matt Doherty’s fortunes would turn, and from that day forward, Doherty’s ACC record would be 12-25?  It would have seemed impossible at the time.  But whatever mojo the 2001 team had, it was lost.  They stumbled a few more times down the stretch and were upset by Penn State in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

… as much as the hurt he felt, Doherty struggled to deal with the mysterious nature of a season that has to be regarded as one of the absolute strangest in the program’s rich history.  In a matter of days, the Heels went from a No. 1 national ranking to a team that simply couldn’t quit shooting itself in the foot.  “I’ll never be able to figure it out,” junior Jason Capel said.  “We tried to put the pieces back together, but I don’t guess we ever did.” – Caulton Tudor, Raleigh News & Observer, March 19, 2001

Perhaps that run of initial success was the worst thing that could have happened to Doherty and the program.  Coming off a Final Four run under Bill Guthridge, it must have seemed to everyone that the program would just keep rolling.  It’s a good lesson to all of us that in sports, and in life, sustained excellence is never automatic.  There’s no such thing as greatness on autopilot.  It has to be earned, one day at a time.

2003 Top 50 List: Not eligible

Dan Collins List: No

Chris Paul was a prized recruit from West Forsyth High School outside of Winston-Salem.  Getting him to stay home was a coup for Skip Prosser.  Paul immediately stepped into the starting lineup as a freshman, enabling Justin Gray to play off the ball, and giving the Demon Deacons one of the best backcourts in the country for the two years that Paul was there.  He edged out Luol Deng as ACC Rookie of the Year.  In his sophomore campaign, Paul was named first team All-America.  His last college game was one of the all-time great NCAA Tournament games, the double overtime shootout with the Mike Gansey/Kevin Pittsnogle West Virginia team in which nobody could miss in overtime.

“I was at the top of our 1-3-1 zone,” Gansey said. “Paul’s second speed was my highest speed, my 10^th speed. He just had an unreal gear to him. We’d put two or three people on him, and he still got where he wanted to go. We had to mix stuff up to try to stop him from getting in the paint. To this day he’s the quickest guy — herky-jerky, north, south, east, west — I ever played with or against. He just got what he wanted. I was trying my hardest, and he was still blowing by me.”

“Chris Paul is the quickest man I ever saw,” said the 6-10 Pittsnogle of the most demonic of the Deacons, the 6-2 Paul. “He’d throw one fake at me, and I’d still be reacting to it when he’d throw another one.” – Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 24, 2015

The most interesting aspect of Paul’s record is that statistically, his freshman year was just as good as his sophomore year.  Yet he couldn’t crack second team All-ACC as a freshman.  Prior to the one-and-done era, it was rare, but not unheard of, for a freshman to make first or second team.  Some who did:

• Skip Wise, Clemson, 1975
• Brad Davis, Maryland, 1975
• Gene Banks, Duke, 1978
• Jeff Lamp, UVa, 1978
• Mark Price, GT, 1983
• Johnny Dawkins, Duke, 1983
• JR Reid, UNC, 1987
• Kenny Anderson, GT, 1990
• Rodney Rogers, Wake, 1991
• Joe Smith, Maryland, 1994
• Antawn Jamison, UNC, 1996

Why didn’t Paul?  Statistically, his freshman season seems outstanding.  I’m not sure why the All-ACC voters didn’t see him as having a better year than, say, BJ Elder of Georgia Tech.  Perhaps part of the reason was the presence of Gray in the same backcourt.  He was a year older and had a great year in his own right.  I’m guessing the voters didn’t feel it was justified having both Wake Forest guards on first team, and they gave Gray the first team votes because of seniority.  The next year, both Gray and Paul had very similar statistics, but the voters could no longer deny Paul’s greatness, and their All-ACC positions flipped.

I attended the 2005 ACC Tournament.  Along with UNC and Duke, Wake Forest came in as one of the favorites, but they were beaten soundly by NC State in the quarterfinal.  I had forgotten that Paul was suspended for that game because of the infamous Julius Hodge groin punch.  Between that loss and the West Virginia loss, it was a disappointing finish to Paul’s college career.  Didn’t exactly hold him back though… he’s on a fast track to the basketball Hall of Fame.  In fact, there is a very good argument that Chris Paul is the second-best pro player ever produced by the ACC.  It’s either Paul or Tim Duncan.

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: Yes

Do you know about the 1960s Duke program?  Because if you’re an ACC fan, you should.  We all know about the great teams of Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski, and even Roy Williams and Tony Bennett, but what about the great teams of Vic Bubas?

I suppose the main reason we don’t hear as much about 1960s Duke is that they didn’t win a national championship.  OK; but they did everything you can do in a program short of that.  Art Heyman is the best-known player, and with good reason, but they had lots of really good players.  Jeff Mullins, Bob Verga, Steve Vacendak, Jack Marin, and Mike Lewis (#90 on my list) are the most notable. 

Marin, Verga, and Vacendak were the core of the 1965 and 1966 teams.  The 1965 team averaged 92.4 points per game, third in ACC history behind 1973 NC State (92.9) and 1975 NC State (92.7).  They beat Virginia 136-72, and in case you’re wondering, that game does hold the record for most points against an ACC opponent and largest margin of victory over an ACC opponent.  Looking at the box score for that game, obviously there are a lot of eye-popping numbers, but the thing that struck me was, every player on Duke’s roster, all 14 of them, scored.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen that.  Can you think of a basketball game in which 14 different players scored?

In Marin’s three years (1964-66), the Blue Devils won the ACC regular season each year, won the tournament twice, and went to two Final Fours.  Marin was named first team All-ACC in 1965 and 1966 and was runner up to Vacendak in ACC Player of the Year voting in 1966 (I’ll have more to write about this in a future post).  Marin was named second team All-America as well.  He went on to have a fine NBA career, scoring over 12,000 career points and twice making the All-Star team.

As I was looking at the 1960s Duke teams, it got me thinking about the greatest programs in ACC history.  By program, I mean going beyond a one or two-year period where you can win with the same group of players.  I decided to look at five-year stretches.  Five years is long enough that you have to have at least two different core groups of players and maybe three.  So what was the greatest five-year stretch in ACC history?

To study this, I looked at all ACC programs which either:

• Won 80% or more of ACC games over a 5-year period, or
• Made 3 or more Final Fours over a 5-year period

When there was a team that had multiple 5-year stretches in a 7- or 8-year period, I tried to pick the best 5-year stretch within that.  I made an exception for UNC 1983-1987; their ACC record was so good, I included them even though I already had UNC 1981-1985.

Best 5-Year Stretches, listed in order of ACC Winning %:

This is an interesting list on several levels, but getting back to the Vic Bubas Blue Devils, I think it shows that their record stacks up pretty well against anybody.

Here are the best 5-year stretches for other programs that have been in the league long enough for that to be an interesting question:

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: No

Grady Wallace played two years at South Carolina, 1956 and 1957.  He was a junior college transfer (remember when that was a thing?) from Pikeville (KY).  His senior year was the year of North Carolina’s 32-0 national championship team.  Lennie Rosenbluth was the ACC Player of the Year; Wallace was the second-best player in the ACC and was selected unanimously to first team All-ACC.  A few brave souls even voted for Wallace as POY over Rosenbluth.  Wallace was a consensus second team All-American as well.  He led a Gamecocks program that had been an ACC doormat to at least respectability, if not excellence, culminating in a run to the ACC Tournament final – the only final the program made until their last two years in the league (1970 and 1971).

He scored.  A lot.  He led the nation in scoring in 1957, one of only two ACC players to do so (Virginia Tech’s Erick Green is the other).  He also led the ACC in rebounding that year.  He scored 54 in a win over Georgia – the fifth-highest total in ACC history.  He is second to Buzz Wilkinson in ACC career scoring average and sixth in career rebound average.  He had seven 40-point games in 1957, an ACC record for a single season.  He is one of four players to score 900+ points in a season (Dennis Scott, JJ Redick, and Len Chappell are the others).  There’s just too much there to leave out.

His case, his game, and his numbers are similar to Buzz Wilkinson.  He scored a ton of points for a team that wasn’t all that great.  If he played today, he’d be called a “volume shooter”.  As we did with Buzz, we have to trust his contemporaries, who clearly saw him as an elite player.

Last Friday night after Coach Red Lawson had watched all-American candidate Wallace fire in 54 points against his Georgia team on its home court, he said “Wallace is the greatest offensive player I’ve ever seen.” – Rock Hill Herald, Dec. 26, 1956

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: Yes

Trivia question: Three players have been voted ACC Player of the Year unanimously.  Who are they? 

Trivia answer: David Thompson, 1975; Josh Howard, 2003; Tyler Hansbrough, 2008.

The 2003 Wake Forest team is one of the unexpected breakthrough seasons in ACC history.  The Deacons program had been mired in the middle of the conference standings in the post-Tim Duncan era:

1998: 7-9 under Dave Odom

1999: 7-9 under Odom

2000: 7-9 under Odom

2001: 8-8 under Odom

2002: 9-7 under Skip Prosser

Prosser had a good recruiting class coming in in 2003, but no one expected them to do much.  They were picked to finish sixth in the ACC in preseason polls.  Their best returning player was Howard, a third team All-ACC performer who was thought of as a solid player but not an exceptional one.

The first sign that things were different was on December 4, when the Deacons, behind 31 points from Howard, went to Wisconsin and pulled off a 90-80 victory in the Big Ten challenge.  Howard had big game after big game, asserting himself as the best player in the ACC, and Wake Forest went on to finish 13-3 in the ACC and to a Top 10 ranking.  Howard brought home everything: the scoring title, ACC Player of the Year, and first team All-America.

Howard’s great season seems to have been quite unexpected.  I was trying to think of similar situations, where an established player suddenly took a quantum leap forward to become one of the best players in the country.  The best comparisons I could come up with were Chris Carrawell, Nolan Smith, and Brice Johnson.  Brice Johnson is probably the best comparison; like Howard, he was third team All-ACC as a junior, then took a huge step forward as a senior to be first team All-America. But Howard was better, I think.

Howard was a very good player on the Dallas Mavericks teams of the 2000s.  He and Jerry Stackhouse were integral parts of the 2006 team that lost in the finals to the D-Wade/Shaq-led Miami Heat.

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: Yes

Kenny Carr’s first year was David Thompson’s last with the Wolfpack.  He played, of course, a supporting role to Thompson that year; but the next year, he took the starring role.  His 1976 season has to be considered one of the outstanding sophomore campaigns in the league’s history.  He led the league in scoring at 26.6 points per game and finished just behind Mitch Kupchak in ACC Player of the Year balloting.  The Wolfpack managed a second place tie in the ACC standings, which was better than might have been expected without Thompson.

Carr was the same age as Phil Ford and Rod Griffin.  Through the sophomore season, you would have to say he was neck-and-neck with Ford.  Carr did slightly better in All-ACC balloting; Ford did slightly better in All-America balloting, making second team to Carr’s third team.

As a junior, Carr’s scoring, FG%, and FT% dropped although he still led the ACC in scoring.  For one thing, his supporting cast changed; Phil Spence and Al Green gave way to freshmen Hawkeye Whitney and Clyde Austin.  Whitney, in particular, never saw a shot he didn’t like, so you can imagine that sharing the ball may have been an issue.  Whatever the reason, Carr still made first team All-ACC, but he was leapfrogged by Griffin and Ford, who were clearly the two best players in the conference that year.  Figuring he had gotten as much out of college as he could, Carr made the jump to the NBA, where he had a solid 10-year career.

“To me, Kenny was one of those players that was ahead of his time,” said former North Carolina rival and Olympic teammate Phil Ford. “Now, it’s not uncommon to see someone with Kenny’s size and strength with the ability to play on the perimeter and knock in jump shots or put the ball on the deck and drive to the basket. When we were coming along, guys with Kenny’s strength and size always played inside. He was just a little before his time.” – Tim Peeler, gopack.com, “Kenny Carr Carried on Thompson’s Scoring Legacy”

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: No

ACC basketball in 1995 was as good it’s ever been (OK, maybe 1974 was better).  It had produced the national champion in 1991, 1992, and 1993 and the runner up in 1994.  In 1995, the sophomore class featured Joe Smith, Jerry Stackhouse, Tim Duncan, and Rasheed Wallace.  Smith was the consensus National Player of the Year.  Wake Forest, UNC, Maryland, and Virginia all tied for the regular season title at 12-4 in the league.  The tournament was incredible, featuring a 97-92 semifinal win for UNC over Maryland in overtime, and then the classic final, as Wake Forest beat UNC 82-80 in overtime behind Randolph Childress.  All four of the top teams made the Sweet 16, meaning the league went 8-0 in the first two rounds of the NCAAs.

But just as the ACC was experiencing its highest high, the seeds of college basketball’s demise were being sown.  That very season was the first in which more than 1-2 players had been lost to early entry to the NBA.  Six players from the 1994 first and second team All-America teams – Jason Kidd, Donyell Marshall, Glenn Robinson, Clifford Rozier, Lamond Murray, and Jalen Rose – had left early.  And it was those departures that opened the path for Smith, Stackhouse, and Wallace to make All-American themselves.

So we can draw a line in the sand between the 1994 and 1995 seasons.  Starting in 1995, and forever after, All-American starts to get diluted; because there are players of the same age in the NBA who absolutely would have made it, instead of the players who actually did.  Stackhouse was a beneficiary of that.  The year before, Kidd, Marshall, Robinson, and Rozier were all underclassmen on first team.  It seems likely they would have made it again, leaving only one spot for a new player, who probably would have been Joe Smith.  Of course, Chris Webber was in the NBA too, having left the year before, so the 1995 team probably would have been Webber, Kidd, Marshall, Robinson, and Rozier.

But Stackhouse was a tremendous player.  His stats are hurt somewhat by the fact that in 1994, Dean Smith insisted on starting Brian Reese and Kevin Salvadori and bringing Stackhouse and Wallace off the bench.  Wallace finally moved into the starting lineup late in the season, but Stackhouse never did.  He was MVP of the ACC Tournament, but evidently that wasn’t enough to unseat Reese, who was still starting in the NCAA Tournament when the Tar Heels were upset by Boston College in the second round.

In 1995, Stackhouse edged out Randolph Childress by six points for the last spot on first team AP All-America, with Wallace and Duncan not far behind.  All of them were chasing ACC and National Player of the Year Joe Smith, who led the voting.  This is one of only three years in which the ACC placed that many on the AP team.  The others are 1974, when there were six (David Thompson, John Lucas, Bobby Jones, Len Elmore, Tom McMillen, Tom Burleson), and 2005 (JJ Redick, Chris Paul, Sean May, Shelden Williams, Raymond Felton).

Stackhouse had a long and, in some ways, impressive NBA career, but he was a notoriously inefficient offensive player, consistently taking a high volume of shots at a low percentage.  You didn’t see that coming in college; his True Shooting Percentage in 1995 was 60%, which is very good, and he shot 41% from three.  It seems that he did not develop much as a jump shooter in the NBA, instead relying on his elite athleticism and ability to get to the line.  Rasheed Wallace was a better NBA player.

2003 Top 50 List: No

Dan Collins List: No

The first year of the ACC was 1953-54.  Virginia was the last team to be admitted, on December 4, 1953.  They had to scramble to schedule games with ACC teams at that late date, and they wound up playing only five ACC games that first season.  The 1955 season was much better structured, with each team playing 14 conference games.

The players of that era, then, began their careers prior to the ACC but finished in the ACC.  Of the class of 1954, the best was probably Gene Shue of Maryland; but with only one year in the ACC, I did not seriously consider him for the list.  Of the class of 1955, two are worthy of consideration: Dickie Hemric and Buzz Wilkinson.

To be honest, it’s hard to evaluate the players of this era.  Best I can tell, the ACC wasn’t a great league, and the conditions of the game were so different.  If you told me that Buzz Wilkinson isn’t one of the 200 greatest players in ACC history, I’d find it hard to argue with you; or if you told me he’s one of the 50 greatest, I’d find it hard to argue with that either.  But we have to do the best we can with the information we have.  The man did average over 30 points per game in both seasons; I know it’s a different era, but 30 points is 30 points.  He did make first team All-ACC both seasons and received serious consideration for ACC Player of the Year, alongside Hemric and Ronnie Shavlik, in 1955.  He was named third team All-American by the AP in 1955.  All this despite playing on a team that finished sixth in an eight-team league.  He was clearly seen as a really good player by the observers of that time.

He has all kinds of ACC scoring records.  Most 40-point games, 10; most field goal attempts in a game, 44; most field goal attempts in a season, 767; highest scoring average in a season, 32.1 in 1955; highest scoring average in a career, 28.1; most 30-point games in a season (20) and a career (33, tied with David Thompson).  He scored 2,233 career points in only 78 games.  He took a staggering number of shots, but even at that volume, he was still more efficient than league average.  Wilkinson was frequently compared to Furman All-American Frank Selvy, who famously scored 100 points in a game against Newberry College.  In February 1954, Buzz had consecutive 45-point games in wins over UNC (the Cavaliers’ first-ever ACC win) and Georgetown.

It seems that he went by both Buzzy and Buzz.  Both names are common in newspaper articles of the time.

“Wilkinson is an artist,” (Virginia coach Bus) Male says, “and just as temperamental.  Oh, no, not in a nasty way.  The boys are crazy about him.  If he scores every point the boys will be glad, just as long as the team wins.  Why, in the game against Hampden-Sydney I took him out.  We weren’t anxious to roll up a score.  Then the captain (Dave Cooke) comes over and asks me to put Buz back in.  So, with three minutes left in the game, he goes back in and sets a new school record (42 points).  And then after the game the captain comes up and says thanks a lot for putting Buz back in.  That’s an example of how the boys feel.” – Richmond Times Dispatch, December 26, 1953

After graduation, Wilkinson coached the freshman team at UVa for a year before attempting to make the Celtics.  Their guards were a couple of guys named Cousy and Sharman.  Buzz didn’t make the team.