ESPN: 30 for 30

I remember Ewing getting called for goaltending on 4 of UNC's first 5 baskets in 1982.

I also remember UNC winning.

I doubt it's all that intimidating. Lots of guys can stand a foot in front of the basket and block the shots. It's no big deal.

 

I'm not sure if you're serious. It was a one point game that basically came down to an errant Fred Brown pass that handed UNC the game. Oh, and that was the National Championship Game and UNC was the #1 team in the country. UNC was loaded. Just about the entire roster was drafted (not just the starting 5, the entire roster). They had a few guys who could match up with Ewing and may not have been as intimidated (Worthy), but Ewing definitely influenced going to the basket.

 

Wow. Um, I'm a lifelong UNC fan, and I was a freshman at UNC that year, and I think you're confusing this UNC team with another one.

UVA was ranked ahead of them most of the year. The injury to Othell Wilson boosted UNC up to an arguable #1 seed overall in the tournament. And that team was not deep at all. They started Jimmy Black and Matt Doherty, and off the bench was...hardly anything of value. I would bet that Jimmy Braddock or Christ Brust got the most minutes off the bench. And that was a YOUNG team by the standards of the time. In this one and done era it seems like no big deal, but they started a freshman, two sophomores, a junior, and a senior.

Dean Smith had a number of teams as good or better. That one just got the breaks. They could have lost that year, or in 1993, just like they could have won in 1977 or 1984. (The way you're describing the 1982 team, I think you're thinking of the 1984 team.)

 

Didn't that team have James Worthy and Sam Perkins? In any case, they were returning to the Final game after losing to Indiana the previous season. Surely an edge in experience.

EDIT: Yeah, Worthy and Perkins were on that team. How does an alum who was there when it happened forget this?

 

Well, yes. I named two starters. There are 5 players on the court in basketball. That leaves 3. I figured people who cared could figure out the rest.

But Perkins was a sophomore and Worthy a junior who had missed a big chunk of his freshman year to a broken leg.

And they were not intimidated by Ewing standing under the basket and jumping up and blocking shots. If for some reason that really was intimidating, every college team starts at least 3 guys who could do it.

Trust me, as a Carolina fan, that was a fine team, but it wasn't Dean's best team. It wouldn't make a top 5 of best UNC teams of my time as a fan.

 

That was my point. Maybe it wasn't the best Carolina team, but it was still a Carolina team. It was a different game back then, but every other team in the country wasn't Carolina and not every team started 3 guys who were as intimidating as Ewing or that guy I don't hate who played at the Commonwealth of Virginia's ACC representative of the time.

 

"The rest" are the three guys on that team who ended up with significant NBA careers, one of them perhaps the greatest of all time. That team was loaded. It took four or five NBA seasons for that to become obvious, but they were.

I didn't comment on that one way or the other.

 

Call it self-serving; call him irritating -- I am an admitted fan. And this only furthers that opinion.

I got some money suing The S*n who lied about me. I am making a donation to the #JFT96 campaign. A tiny piece of justice.

— Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) April 15, 2014

 

How was the Hillsborough doc?

 

I have since watched it. I found it to be very informative, but then, I was not yet very well-versed in the aftermath of the disaster.

 

That's odd. Because as a pretty avid college bball fan for 30+ yrs, I don't know a Carolina team that was better. Certainly not the Lurch Montross edition pulling it out against the No More Timeouts bunch.

 

77, 84, and 86 were all better, just very unlucky with injuries. The 2009 team was probably the best college team since the rookie salary cap in 1995. The 98 team had a bad shooting day in the final four, but they were pretty similar to the 82 team...great top 5, weak bench. I'd put the 1993 team at least on par with the 1982... less talented, but also less fragile, more solid.

That 1982 team, we were all hoping they'd win. The 2009, 1993, and 1998 teams, we expected a win each game of the tournament.

There's two things you can say about Dean Smith. First, if there's another college coach whose innovations had more impact on the game, hell, HALF the impact on the game, I can't think of him. Second, of all college coaches, he had more teams good enough to win, in so many different eras. Nobody can match him on that score except maybe Adolph Rupp. Unlike, say, Bobby Knight, he didn't pick a year and try to win that one season, sacrificing the year before and after. He tried to compete EVERY year, and did it so, so many times.

 

IMO he should've been given 1,000 lashes for the Four Corners. An anti-competitive dick move that a "great" program like UNC with their recruits should never have to resort to.

Here's a real innovator:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_offense

 

Every single team had a delay game. The Four Corners was just the best one, so soon enough everyone adopted it.

The thing is, when the other team tried to steal the ball, Carolina could score very quickly out of it. Especially when they had Phil Ford, they'd come down and score within 20 seconds pretty often. It was a "pick your poison" ploy. Either defend us over the entire half court, in which case we'll find the right 1v1 matchup and get great shots, or sit back and let us run out the clock.

 

It was a lame strategy. One halftime score against Duke in the late 70s was Duke 7, UNC 0. A friggin football score.

 

I always have hated that and it's a primary reason I wish every high school system in the country used shot clocks.

 

Not sure if I enjoy the half hour installments. Maradona, for what it was going for fit nicely into a 30 minute segment but The Opposition was simply too short for the subject matter. Outside of Hillsborough are all the soccer stories gonna be 3o minutes long?

 

Finally watched the Hillsborough documentary. While it was a good documentary, it was difficult to watch at times. I was a freshman in high school at the time and didn't hear many of the details. The attitude over here seemed to be "Soccer fans being soccer fans". Some of the actions taken and accusations made by the police were pretty despicable.