AROUND THE NATION
July 13, 2010
North Carolina reloads, but catching Duke won't
be easy
This feature also appears on
FoxSports.com
While Duke was hoisting a national championship
trophy a few months back, North Carolina's Roy
Williams was busy mapping his team's route back to
the promised land. Just a season before, he was the
one holding the championship hardware.
But months before a forgettable 2009-10 season would
end with a NIT finals loss to Dayton, Williams had
already taken the first step in getting his team
right back up the mountain. That came with the
signing of Harrison Barnes, the small forward almost
universally considered to be the nation's top ranked
recruit.
If Barnes played football, Beano Cook would be
predicting he’d win three Heisman Trophies. If he
played baseball, Stephen Strasburg would suddenly be
Oates to his Hall. And if Barnes played soccer…well,
nobody would really notice the guy.
The point is, Barnes has emerged out of Ames, IA as
college basketball's next instant superstar, he’s
got an upside so big that you could chisel
presidents’ faces into it. It’s not IF he’ll pull
North Carolina out of the land of NIT doldrums and
into the NCAA Tournament, it’s how far into March
Madness he’ll carry them.
Barnes is so good that North Carolina fans are
forgetting just how dangerously thin their team is
in the frontcourt. And that the roster still doesn’t
feature a point guard who’ll make anyone forget Ty
Lawson anytime soon.
But who knows, maybe the kid might be the kind of
rare talent whose stellar play can mask the
deficiencies around him. Think Danny and the
Miracles back in ‘88 or David Robinson and any Navy
team he played on.
He's definitely showing the kind of swagger that a
future (make that 2011) #1 pick in the draft needs
to have. He strolled into the S.J.G. Greater North
Carolina Pro Am last week wearing a Nike t-shirt
that read, “I’m That Dude.” BLESSED.
El Dude-erino (or the Dude-er, whichever you prefer)
then went out and scored a game high 32 points to
lead Team Stackhouse to a 4-point win over a squad
featuring NC State’s N.C. State’s Jordan Vandenberg
and Scott Wood. DOUBLY BLESSED.
With him in the Tar Heel lineup, maybe 32-point
losses to Duke like the one that closed this past
regular season will be a thing of the past.
However, it's no cosmic certainty that the addition
of Barnes can help North Carolina knock Duke off the
mountaintop. That's because Mike Krzyzewski returns
not only a ton of talent off his national
championship team, but he's also added his own
instant impact recruit.
In Kyrie Irving, Coach K has a new point guard whose
name appeared just under that of Barnes in every set
of recruiting rankings you could find. If Barnes is
a certain top pick in 2011, then Irving won't wait
very long after that to hear his own name called.
Irving cut his teeth under the tutelage of New
Jersey AAU coaching legend Sandy Pyonin. Former Duke
greats Bobby Hurley and Jason Williams were also
coached by Pyonin, but that didn't necessarily mean
Irving's choice of school was a foregone conclusion.
Texas A&M assistant coach Scott Spinelli played
basketball with Irving's father at Boston University
and led a hard charge by the Aggies. Meanwhile,
Kentucky assistant Rod Strickland was a close friend
of the Irving family and led an equally hard charge
by the Wildcats. In the end, though, the lure of
Duke was too much for the nation's best prep point
guard to turn down.
And so two future NBA millionaires have come from
different parts of the country and ended up roughly
15 miles from each other. They're the highest
profile newcomers to America's most heated hoops
rivalry, one in which Duke currently holds the upper
hand.
The "anything you can do, I can do better" interplay
between the nation's top two programs is fascinating
stuff to behold. North Carolina wins the 2009 title,
so Duke counters by winning it in 2010. Coach K inks
Irving, and then the following month Williams signs
Barnes.
Right now, it's good to be North Carolina, but it's
absolutely fantastic to be Duke. The Blue Devils are
an odds on favorite to capture what would be the
second set of back-to-back titles in Coach K's
career. But in this game of college hoops one
upsmanship, the other team in this rivalry can
rarely be counted out.
John Stansberry is in his thirteenth season as
a senior writer for collegeinsider.com. Check out
John's blog
LonelyTailgater.com.
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