Let’s look at the five times Carolina Basketball has returned to the Final Four the following season in quest of the national championship. (Of the Tar Heels’ six NCAA crowns, they never got back to the last weekend and make it two in a row.)
In each occurrence except one, the next year’s team “on paper” looked weaker than its predecessor. And, right now at least, the 2023 Heels are in the same spot.
Dean Smith had three consecutive ACC champions and Final Four teams from 1967 through 1969, literally centered around 6-10 Rusty Clark and 6-8 Bill Bunting.
In 1968, the Tar Heels had lost senior guard Bob Lewis, the lithe two-time All-ACC first teamer who still holds UNC’s single-game scoring record (49) from the 1965-66 season, when he led the league with a 27.4 average. As a senior, Lewis’ scoring unselfishly dropped 10 points per game to accommodate junior strongman Larry Miller, who won the first of consecutive Player of the Year awards.
But would Carolina be as good without Lewis and replaced by sophomore Charlie Scott, the first Black scholarship athlete at UNC and a transcendent talent even as a sophomore? Behind Miller and Scott, the Heels won a second straight outright regular season and ACC tournament and returned to the Final Four, where it lost a one-sided NCAA championship game to perennial power UCLA and Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).
The following year, Miller was gone and seemingly could not be replaced. Scott averaged 22 points and was bolstered by Bunting, the senior forward who earned first-team All-ACC honors with 18 points per game. That 1969 team swept its third straight set of ACC titles but, without injured starting point guard Dick Grubar, lost badly to Purdue and All-American Rick Mount in the national semis.
The next back-to-back Final Fours came 12 years later, when the Tar Heels rocked Virginia and Ralph Sampson on semifinal Saturday behind 39 points from senior Al Wood before losing to Indiana and All-American Isiah Thomas on Monday night.
Four starters returned in 1982, but could they be better without the sweet-shooting Wood? There was highly recruited freshman “Mike” Jordan, who was mostly third banana behind junior James Worthy and sophomore Sam Perkins. Turned out that Carolina won Smith’s first national championship on a Jordan jumper while Georgetown covered Worthy and Perkins under the basket.
Fast forward to the Roy Williams era when Ol’ Roy had five Final Four teams, twice going back-to-back at UNC. In 2008, the Heels won both the ACC regular season and tournament behind All-American and Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough before losing to Kansas on a sad Saturday in San Antonio. Much like the 1981 team had done, they vowed to get back to the Final Four and win the dadgum thing.
All five starters returned in 2009 and actually got some unexpected firepower when Danny Green replaced the injured Marcus Ginyard and had a sterling senior year. Carolina was dominant in more of a rout than redemption and became the first champion to post all six NCAA tournament victories by double figures, capped with the 89-72 blowout of Michigan State in Detroit.
Although Williams challenged his team in October of 2016 to go back and avenge the last-second loss to Villanova the previous April, the so-called “Redeem Team” was without gutty leader Marcus Paige and All-American Brice Johnson. How could the successors be better?
But they were, at least in the NCAA tourney, defeating Oregon and Gonzaga in Phoenix to earn Williams’ third natty in his 33-year Hall of Fame career. And that team stacks up well with what lies ahead in 2023.
Carolina fans are ecstatic over the return of four starters from the team that marched dramatically to the Final Four and fell short of Kansas by three points on April 4 in New Orleans.
Although their leading scorers (Armando Bacot and Caleb Love), best ballhandler and distributor (RJ Davis) and top defender (Leaky Black) are back for another season, the unsung hero of the team (Brady Manek) has run out of eligibility.
That is a major, major hole to fill and one that marks the biggest difference between the team that left the court brokenhearted in the Big Easy and the returning team that will try to finish what it started in Houston next April.
In many ways, it was a perfect storm of circumstance and Manek became the straw that stirred the drink. His development as college basketball’s super stretch forward (after Dawson Garcia departed and left all of his minutes to Manek) cannot be overstated.
He made the open-floor offense that Hubert Davis talked about since literally his first day on the job come alive. And his 40 percent shooting from 3-point range helped Bacot become the most formidable rebounder in the country.
Manek also has immeasurable instincts and savvy for the game. When defenses denied him the ball, he had already scoped out his next move, a la Larry Bird, by breaking for the basket on his way to a dunk. His “catch and release” passing and shooting orchestrated devastating runs like the incredible 42 points the Tar Heels scored in the last 12 minutes of the then-shocker at Duke.
So, the need for a potential replacement is imperative. Until a new No. 4 man proves he can consistently make shots from the perimeter, defenses will begin the new season by double-teaming Bacot, who needs a wide-open lane to operate as effectively he did as a junior.
And even if Love and Davis shoot as well as they did as sophomores, the Tar Heels cannot be as dangerous scoring the ball unless their second-year coach finds that new stretch four or tweaks the offense to accentuate the strengths of two juniors (Puff Johnson and Kerwin Walton), a sophomore (Dontrez Styles) or two freshmen (Tyler Nickel and Jalen Washington).
Unlike the unknown team with a rookie coach that scared no one before the season, the next Tar Heels face a schedule of opponents that will have scouted them all summer and be ready to tangle from the first time the ball goes up.
Due to the veterans returning, Carolina is likely to be picked No. 1 in some preseason polls and has a chance to become the third “Redeem Team” under a third head coach in UNC history. Maybe not coincidentally, Davis seems like a combination of Smith and Williams, from spiritual to fiery and everything in between the coach he played for and the one he coached under.
For Hubert to do what his predecessors did and far more quickly, however, there must be the right response for replacing Manek and adequate answer to all the attention gained since that last buzzer sounded.
Featured image via Todd Melet
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Well written and leaves one thinking ,
All this is true, and the revisiting of all those wonderful teams brought back many memories for someone who was in school during much of that period. Carolina basketball at its finest regardless of the National Championship issues! I remember when Carmichael was so loud with the cheering and stomping on the wooden retractable student bleachers that it seemed like they would collapse. Awesome memories for us older Alumni!
Of course all this will end up depending upon how the incoming players meld with the current returnees. My guess is that COACHING will win in the end given that the incoming players–not many bad ones from what I hear!–are able to form a cohesive unit that plays the game that the are capable of playing.
Of course, as the cliche goes, that is why they play the games! No matter what, it should be a very exciting season of Tar Heel basketball, which is what we need to become used to again!
Go Heels!