A little history lesson via ACC Sports as a companion to the official news that Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski will coach Team USA again.
The American failure in Munich shocked the nation’s basketball elite out of their decades-long complacency over the nation’s Olympic dominance. To most fans, it became vital to re-assert America’s control of the sport it had invented and so long ruled with an iron hand. The key was to find a coach more in tune with the modern game than the 68-year-old Iba, whose greatest success had come in the mid-1940s.
UNC’s Smith To The Rescue
North Carolina’s Dean Smith, who was 45 years old in 1976, was selected to fill that role by a committee that included Iba, Red Auerbach, Pete Newell, Wayne Embree and Dave Gavitt. The Tar Heel coach picked his good friend John Thompson and his right-hand man at UNC, Bill Guthridge, as his assistants.
Picking the 12-man roster for the 1976 U.S. Olympic team was far more controversial. When the team was announced after tryouts on the N.C. State campus in Raleigh, it included seven ACC players, including four from Smith’s own UNC team.
“I didn’t select the players; the selection committee did,” Smith later wrote in his autobiography. “I had a single vote. I was allowed to advise the committee on the type of players I was looking for, but that was no guarantee that I would get the players I wanted. In fact, I lost several arguments.”
Nevertheless, Smith became the target of critics who claimed that he stacked the team with his own players. He was blasted for cutting Marquette big man Bo Ellis, who actually quit during the second lap of Smith’s required mile run, while keeping his own Tommy LaGarde, a big man who had played second fiddle to UNC’s Mitch Kupchak during the 1975 season.
People generally forget that following the 1972 loss to the USSR in Munich, USA Basketball was at a crossroads. Yes, the Soviets basically cheated and there was no way time should have been put back on the clock. However, the loss stung nonetheless and did not sit well with the American public. For one, the loss in Munich had all sorts of Cold War resentment surrounding it. Beyond that, basketball was invented in and dominated by the United States. We basically owned it and for the most part Americans saw the United States as being vastly superior in the sport which meant there was no excuse for losing. When Team USA started sputtering in the early part of this decade on the international stage I am not sure anyone was surprised. While the United States can still boast producing the best basketball players in the world, the parity is better because many foreign teams have NBA stars on them and they also tend to play a more team oriented style of basketball. Yes, Krzyzewski gets credit for having his players on the same page and redeeming the Team USA on the Olympic stage in 2008. However, in 1976 the stakes were much higher. The American public was demanding a gold medal victory to fully redeem the debacle in 1972. In other words, the pressure to win when you are expected to win can be much greater than the hope you win playing against a set of comparable opponents. That is nature of what Dean dealt with in putting together the 1976 team and winning in Montreal. So for all the laud and praise that is heaped upon Mike Krzyzewski for returning Team USA to the gold medal position, let us not forget that it was Dean Smith who was first tasked with the job of restoring American Olympic glory in basketball, a job he did in impressive fashion under far more stress.
As a side note, one of the huge debates that has cropped up is whether Mike Krzyzewski has damaged the Duke program by doing this stint as coach of Team USA. Duke has suffered in recent years, and their slide below UNC as coincided with Krzyzewski’s work with USA Basketball. Are the two related? It is difficult to say, mainly because the fact the 2005 recruiting class was such an abject failure has a lot to do with Duke’s issues than anything else though one could argue that had Krzyzewski been focused on all things Duke from 2006-2008 he could have acted to prevent Duke’s slide. It is noteworthy that following Dean’s Olympic stint UNC went to the 1977 NCAA title game with a senior laden team but did not win an NCAA Tournament game again until 1981. Was Dean’s Olympic stint(which included chief assistant Bill Gurthridge) partly to blame for UNC suffering a slight downturn or in both cases is it correlation without causation?
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That was a pretty good team tho they almost lost to Puerto Rico and Yugoslavia.
Dean did the Carolina family, as well as the nation proud. Too bad they didn’t get a payback game with the Soviets….
Forgive my ignorance… Carolina went to the Sweet Sixteen every year from ’81 – ’93? I thought the streak was longer than that.
No, that is correct. Funny thing is Andy Katz wrote an article in the early days of THF saying that Duke going to nine straight Sweet Sixteens was some kind of achievement on the same order of magnitude with Wooden’s 10 titles. Never mind UNC did 12 straight to the Sweet Sixteen.
Well, if BC in 1994 never happened, then we might have extended it for a while longer.
if memory serves, Scott May played on that 1976 Olympic team for Smith. Turned out well for UNC nearly 30 yrs later when Sean May was looking for an alternate choices not named Indiana.
Speaking of Sean, he’s off to Sacramento… maybe a change of venue will help. I think he has gotten a raw deal in Charlotte from fans, and not much help from the mostly Tar Heel front office. I feel Sean’s to blame as well, so I’m hoping this will be a plus for him.
I don’t follow pro ball that much anymore so there may be more to the story than the little I’ve picked up.
I am not sure that I would say that the Soviets basically cheated.
Isn’t it more the case that they accepted a dubious victory after egregious refereeing errors, which is something not all that uncommon in the NFL. The sad fact, which you allude to, is that the U.S. would have been incredibly fortunate to have won that game had they not received the bad calls at the end.
The 1976 Olympic team did almost lose to Puerto Rico, which had Ford’s nemesis Butch Lee. The Yugoslavia final was not tense at all. I remember wishing it could have been against the Soviets.
With respect to Smith, I don’t believe the Olympics had anything to do with UNC’s mini-dip, unless someone can show how it hurt recruiting.
Carolina had a slew of guys like Mike O’Koren, Dudley Bradley, Jeff Wolf, John Virgil and Geoff Crompton, who, while fan favorites, either did not turn out or who were inferior to your Albert Kings and Jeff Lamps and Gene Banks and Mike Gminiskis. I am not sure if Smith tried to recruit Moses Malone, whom Lefty got (what a team that might have been), and Smith missed on Sampson, making Worthy a key acquisition.
Al Wood was a nice player, but those teams were not loaded the way many UNC teams are. Mike Pepper, another favorite of mine, started his senior year, but he was probably not even as good as Brad Hoffman and definitely not as good as John Kuester.
It is kind of strange, because I believe the teams from 1978, 1979 and 1980 were among Smith’s weakest teams of all time, and yet, in some respects, they had results better than the 1973 and 1974 teams, which were packed with future NBA stars like Bobby Jones, Mitch Kupchak, and Walter Davis.
But essentially, from the time of LaGarde’s injury in 1977, until the arrival of Sam Perkins in 1981, UNC did not have anything but journeymen centers. Since I have been following UNC, there have been three major periods where I have lost somewhat, slightly, interest in the basketball program and these periods were 1978-80, 1998-90 and 2000-02. I am not sure how Smith kept his streak of top finishes going those years when you look at the talent that Duke, Maryland, Virginia and NC State had.
Dookie V rolled out his “Rolls Royce” team on ESPN.com. I mainly mention it just to poke fun at it. Kyle Singler’s picture is positioned no too far below Dookie V’s mug shot (probably from 1991), and the Dook forward is listed on the Dooker’s First Team. Here’s why I even bother mentioning this:
SIXTH TEAM
C-Ed Davis, North Carolina — 6.4 PPG, 6.8 RPG
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
This is what I meant by relating to a challenge….really not a near loss..sorry. I had to google to help my memory.
Facing Yugoslavia, a team that had earlier whipped Puerto Rico 84-63, the USA rallied in the second half to claim a 112-93 win. The U.S. trailed 55-51 at half after falling into foul trouble, but Smith’s troops came out and scored the first eight points of the second half and never again trailed after taking a 64-63 lead with 15 minutes to play.
K is a tremendous coach, but I think USA Baketball’s decision to ask players for a long-term commitment had more to do with winning the gold medal in Beijing. Larry Brown did the best he could (with Roy as an assistant) but many of the NBA’s star players bailed on the U.S. team before the 2004 Olympics. Getting a group of talented athletes to play together as a team over several years is key.
Well, I don’t know too many knowledgeable fans who sit back and say “Wow, that Coach K is really amazing! How did he manage to win the gold with THOSE players?”
In regards to Larry Brown, that has to be the one thing that still eats at him. Sure he was stripped of some major talent, but there were some bad apples on that team, and they seemed to bring the whole thing down with them.
Let’s be honest, when K talks to these players, they is very little listening going on. Don’t buy for a second that they hang on his every word. They know what they need to do, and the coach needs to let them do that. His skill lies in the area of cohesiveness, where he has proven that he can get everyone on the same page in terms of dedication. You don’t often hear about his players openly dissing him over playing time. Oh wait, they don’t comment publicly, they just transfer.
If I sound bitter, it’s only because I know what K is doing. I know this is all about HIS legacy and I think he’s a little pissed that more people aren’t lavishing him with the praise he feels he might deserve. Too many are saying that the talent won and that the coaching was secondary. So now he’ll do the same thing in 2012, and he can say, “well, our record at Dook couldn’t match North Carolina’s during the last few years of my career, but hey…aren’t these medals nice?”
In this situation, K has the perfect trump card. People criticize him or the team, he challenges their patriotism. If people say that Dook have fallen from the elite, he can talk about the (I presume) two gold medals. K has always managed to find little loop holes that will allow him to wiggle out of any large amount of criticism.
Yeah, I think Puerto Rico against the U.S. is sort of like Maryland versus Duke. The U.S. might not view Puerto Rico as a rival but Puerto Rico really gets up for those basketball games and often gives the U.S. fits.
Yugoslavia and what it became, have long been relative basketball hotbeds and it was no surprise really, when they took out the Soviets.
With respect to Larry Brown, I don’t know really. I am not a huge fan of his to begin with, but he took the job and he is stuck with the results. Obviously, he had more talent than anyone else in the world, but he seemed to be way behind the curve in dealing with the rule changes and lacked shooters.
I am not sure that K has necessarily done such a bang-up job either. He has had 2 major world championships and won a gold and a bronze. Spain gave him all he wanted in the finals in Peking. The U.S. is the Brazil(soccer) of basketball, perhaps even more so in terms of talent differential and anything less than gold every time is still, in my mind, due either to poor coaching and organization, or bad luck.
I would like to seem them implement a system akin to what England does in soccer, where a player receives jerseys for each appearance and where a core group is kept together, rather than simply starting from scratch each time.
Yeah, I think Puerto Rico against the U.S. is sort of like Maryland versus Duke. The U.S. might not view Puerto Rico as a rival but Puerto Rico really gets up for those basketball games and often gives the U.S. fits.
Yugoslavia and what it became, have long been relative basketball hotbeds and it was no surprise really, when they took out the Soviets.
With respect to Larry Brown, I don’t know really. I am not a huge fan of his to begin with, but he took the job and he is stuck with the results. Obviously, he had more talent than anyone else in the world, but he seemed to be way behind the curve in dealing with the rule changes and lacked shooters.
I am not sure that K has necessarily done such a bang-up job either. He has had 2 major world championships and won a gold and a bronze. Spain gave him all he wanted in the finals in Peking. The U.S. is the Brazil of basketball, perhaps even more so in terms of talent differential and anything less than gold every time is still, in my mind, due either to poor coaching and organization or bad luck.
I would like to seem them implement a system akin to what England does in soccer, where a player receives jerseys for each appearance and where a core group is kept together, rather than simply starting from scratch each time.
I see Dickie V mentions Singler’s “strong presence down low”. When did Singler get a “strong presence down low”? Does anyone at dook have a “strong presence down low”? Isn’t that one of their glaring weaknesses?
I hate to say it, but it sounds nearly novical to talk about Duke and a “down low” presence. I haven’t seen it, and neither have Sean May, Tyler Hansbrough, Deon Thompson, and Ed Davis.
Maybe when they had Deng, Randolph and that big kid whose eyes were too close together, back in 2004. Can you imagine if UNC (Dean, especially) lost a 9 point lead in the last three minutes? We would never hear the end of it.
I know leads go fast nowadays but Duke had double-digit second half leads against three eventual national champions, in the Final 8 or later, in 1994, 1998 and 2004 and blew all three games. They also blew a big lead against runner-up Indiana in 2002.
Larry Brown was toast with the 2004 team when almost every big name player found or looked for ways not to play…Almost every big name player had an excuse of some sort..To say that Brown had the players is a joke…When your only big name star is Allen Iverson, it’s time to pack it in…
William, I know you don’t like Brown, but to say he had the horses in 2004 is an insult…You’re telling me you don’t remember all those players saying they couldn’t play??? That team made more news by who announced they couldn’t play than who actually played..
Same thing happened to George Karl when he coached the World Championship team…
I said he had more talent than any other team in the world, but maybe you think Greece was more talented, or perhaps, Argentina. I don’t think anyone on here said he had the “horses”, but if someone did, it sure wasn’t me. I don’t think any of the other nations in the world were feeling sorry for us for being under-talented vis-a-vis the rest of the world.
The fact is that Brown decided to coach the Olympic team, just like he decided to quit the Pistons and coach the Knicks, and then the hapless Bobcats, and the results are what they are. K won and Larry didn’t.
Give K credit at least for either managing the situation or at least entering a situation where things were in place for an almost certain victory. And let us not forget that K’s results in his first World event were about the same as Brown’s.
If Brown wants to resurrect his reputation from the last several horrible seasons with the Knicks and the Bobcats, maybe he can try to get the Bobcats into the play-offs, but then again, drafting Gerald Henderson number one gives me very little confidence that Brown and Jordan have any ideas whatsoever about what they are doing.