Others before and since would at least have one title they could claim. It’s right around the time high schoolers started declaring for the NBA draft, and this Tar Heel squad was one of the last that would have to have significant NBA talent stay through three years. The ‘97-’98 squad is unique in a lot of ways. The closest comparison you could make would be with the 1982 team, in both actual depth and those who made the NBA team, of course the biggest difference being that two players have their jerseys retired from that squad, whereas only one, Jamison, has his hanging amongst the front row with the retired numbers. It got him in trouble, sure, but sometimes you need someone who’s willing to throw down.Ī quick peek at Sports Reference shows that five players on that team played in the NBA, and four of them were upperclassmen by that point. Finally, to clean up down low when Jamison drew all of the attention, you had Makhtar N’Diaye, who had a mean streak and wouldn't take any talk from anyone. In short, your glue guy that every great Tar Heel team had. Ademola Okulaja was your Swiss-or in this case German-army knife who could slide around in all sorts of places. The wing man was Shammond Williams, a great shooter in the Donald Williams mold who took advantage of the attention the defense had to put on the men down low.
Silky smooth Ed Cota was the man in control at point, only a sophomore, and would eventually be one of the few Tar Heels to say he went to the Final Four three times in his career. You had a freshman in Brendan Haywood, who would go on to have a solid career in the NBA, just stepping onto campus and soaking everything in.
KENTUCKY BASKETBALL ROSTER 1998 CRACK
You had the stars in Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter, both juniors who could have gone to the NBA after 1997 but came back for one more crack at the title. Honestly, all of that is true, but it really boils down to this: the team was loaded. It could be as simple this was the squad that was on campus when I first entered Carolina, it could be the fact that this squad had Dean Smith retire on them right before the season started and them capping it off with a win would have been a perfect cherry on top, or it could be that there really wasn’t any other really dominant team in college basketball that season.
Others will talk wistfully about 1984, or those are just the easy ones to name.īut to me, there’s no team that exemplifies this idea of the best team to never win a title than the 1997-98 UNC squad. One of the (many) ways that the Tar Heel fan base is spoiled when a simple question is posed: what was the best team to never win a national title?Įvan has written before about the 1976-77 team that famously lost to the McGuire Miracle Marquette team. We kick our coverage of that topic off with 1998. This week, all the leagues around SB Nation are looking back at the teams that were the best to never win a title.
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