Tarheels & Titles

I was walking across the UNC campus Tuesday morning and happened to come across Sean May and Jackie Manuel in the middle of a work out on one of the college's astro-turf facilities. A short, rotund gentleman was putting the two former national champions through the paces, blowing a whistle and gingerly tossing around a couple of medicine balls. I didn't stick around long, but the work out didn't strike me as being particularly intense.

At all.

Maybe because of all the talk that's been going around about Kobe's work ethic and its effect on his Olympic teammates, a tangential question popped into my head as I watched: why don't Carolina alumni win NBA championships anymore?

The 2004 Detroit Pistons were the last team to bring home the Larry O'Brien trophy while featuring a Tarheel (Rasheed "Ball Don't Lie" Wallace in this case) on their active roster. While this may not seem like a particularly long drought, consider the following:

In the period of 1991 to 2004, twelve of the fourteen NBA championship teams had UNC alumni in their line-up. Extend the time frame all the way back to 1978 (the year after the merger) and those numbers go to 21 out of 27, with the lean years never lasting longer than two consecutive seasons.

If you exclude the rings won by three of the era's dynasties (the Bird Celtics, the Duncan Spurs, and the Bad Boy Pistons), former Carolina players were a part of seventeen consecutive NBA championships!

In the context of that kind of consistency, four years seems like an eternity.

One obvious explanation for the dry spell would be the retirement of iconic coach Dean Smith in 1997. Every Carolina alumnus who has won an NBA championship in the league's modern era has been a protege of Smith's, and the Tarheel program experienced a fairly bumping transition after the coach's exit. This theory does not, however, account for the careers of guys like Antawn Jamison or Vince Carter, stars who came up in Smith last years but have enjoyed limited post-season success at the next level. Nor does it speak to the tremendous success that Roy Williams has already begun to enjoy in his six seasons in Chapel Hill.

At least as important as Smith retirement have been the dramatic shifts in the composition of the NBA itself that have occured over the last decade. Among the four teams remaining in this years play-offs, there are five foreign-born starters (Varejao, Nene, Ilgauskus, Turkoglu, and Gasol) and at least four more (Pietrus, Kleiza, Gortat and Vujicic) who would be considered major contributors. These numbers would have been considered absurd just 15 or 16 years ago, when Sarunas Marciulionis was considered an oddity for even making it as a sixth man with the Warriors.

Combine this with the continuing reluctance of elite American talent to delay their professional careers for a stint in college, and the trend begins to look much broader. It isn't simply a matter of Carolina guys not winning titles - there aren't that many college guys vying for the trophy...period.

Even if Roy Williams is able to replicate the success of his predecessor - and that's a big if - the days of watching Tarheels dominate the association year after year is probably long gone.