Lucas: The Forgotten Champion

By Adam Lucas

People always forget.

In the discussions of North Carolina's national championship teams, everyone has a favorite. The 1957 team was undefeated. The 1982 team had Michael Jordan. The 2005 team beat a strong Illinois team and was Roy Williams' first national title. The 2009 team included Tyler Hansbrough and decimated the postseason competition. The 2017 team was the redeem team.

And then there's 1993, a team that will celebrate its 25^th anniversary this coming spring. Fittingly, this year's Tar Heels face Michigan tonight in the Smith Center—the first meeting between those two programs since they contested the 1993 national championship in New Orleans.

In a conversation this summer with a couple of Tar Heel standouts from the Williams era, even they weren't entirely sure what to make of Dean Smith's second championship team. "What was that 1993 team like?" Kendall Marshall asked.

Here's the short version: they were tough. Man, were they tough.

They didn't have a flashy NBA-ready player who would instantly star in the pros, although George Lynch and Eric Montross both had solid professional careers. But what they did have, though, was chemistry.

"That team could read each other," said Phil Ford, an assistant coach on the 1993 team. "Henrik Rodl was so smart. The big guys, with Kevin Salvadori and Eric Montross, could play off each other.

"And with George and Derrick Phelps, we had two defenders who could go off and run something totally different and everyone else would pick up on it and adjust. We'd call one thing, Derrick would see something and run something totally different, and everyone else would pick up on it."

Lynch was the unquestioned leader, the senior capable of blistering a teammate for a mistake and then encouraging the same teammate on the very next possession. While in Hawaii for the Rainbow Classic, Lynch had gotten in a wrestling match on the beach and injured his shoulder. He didn't bother to tell anyone, and averaged a double-double in the three games in Hawaii. Ford began calling Lynch "Mangani." "George was just a tough, warrior-like dude," Ford said. "He wasn't just a warrior in the game. He was a warrior in practice, a warrior in the dorm, a warrior walking down the beach."

The 1993 Tar Heels composed one of the signature comebacks in program history, a 21-point second half comeback against a good Florida State squad in the Smith Center, then closed the regular season on a nine-game winning streak and won the ACC regular season race by two full games over FSU.

Only an injury to Derrick Phelps prevented them from adding the league tournament title. The Tar Heels' average margin of victory was 17.8 points per game, tied for the widest scoring margin in program history. Their season rebounding total (3^rd) and steals total (2^nd) still ranks in the top-three all-time among Carolina teams.

They were, in other words, much more than an afterthought. In many ways, they were the quintessential Smith era team. Even in the national title game, Smith inserted several substitutes late in the game because multiple starters had given simultaneous tired signals. The head coach didn't hesitate, didn't ask them to try and make it to the next media timeout. It was a basic fundamental of his program—if a player gave the tired sign, he came out of the game and the team trusted the substitute to play well. That's how reserve point guard Scott Cherry ended up on the court late in the game against the Wolverines, as CBS analyst Billy Packer questioned the wisdom of the substitution.

Cherry, of course, played capably, and the rested Tar Heel starters surged to a win in the final minutes.

The player for whom he substituted, Phelps, was the perfect Carolina point guard at the perfect time. He wasn't an outstanding shooter or an explosive offensive player, but he was one of the best defensive point guards in Tar Heel history, and he understood how to play the position.

Part of Phelps's defensive prowess was physical. Listed at 6-foot-3, he seemed to have the wingspan of a taller player. He combined that spidery reach with an advanced knowledge of how to defend.

"It all goes back to Coach Smith and the way he recruited," said Donald Williams, Phelps' backcourt partner and the Most Outstanding Player of the 1993 Final Four after hitting 10 of his 14 three-pointers in New Orleans. "He knew how to put a puzzle together. Derrick was perfect for that team. He had such good instincts and he did all the things you can't teach. I had to go against him in practice when I was playing some point guard as a freshman, and I thought I was a pretty good offensive player. He would shut me down every day. My freshman year, he made life miserable for me. I wanted to fight him every day."

Multiple opposing point guards could relate, especially Cincinnati's Nick Van Exel. The high-scoring firecracker lit up the Tar Heels for 21 points in the first 15 minutes of the regional final game at the Meadowlands. But after Smith told Phelps to ignore all usual Carolina defensive tactics and focus solely on Van Exel, he managed just one basket the rest of the way.

The culmination of that game was a testament to both Smith's ingenuity and his team's toughness. In a tie game with seconds remaining, Carolina had the ball under its own basket with a chance to win. Smith called timeout (of course he had timeouts remaining—Roy Williams learned it from somewhere, you know) and diagrammed a play to get Brian Reese an open shot at the rim. The head coach even told Reese he probably wouldn't have time to dunk the ball.

The play worked perfectly, and Reese had an open lane to the basket. But he tried to dunk it, and the ball bounced off the rim, allowing Cincinnati to escape into overtime. Having given all the momentum to the Bearcats and having watched a Final Four-clinching dunk go awry, the Tar Heels didn't flinch. They simply closed out the extra five minutes and secured a 75-68 victory.

So maybe the 1993 Tar Heels weren't the prettiest. On one memorable occasion, Florida State's fast-talking Sam Cassell was heard to boast in the halftime locker room that he felt disrespected that the Tar Heels were trying to cover him with less-heralded guard Henrik Rodl. Cassell and the 'Noles built a huge lead at the Smith Center—then watched as Rodl hit key shots to ignite the Carolina comeback.

"As a team," Ford said, "that 1993 group played together as well as any team we've ever had at North Carolina."

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