On the back cover of the 1998 pressing of ‘Dean Smith Basketball’ is a picture of Chicago Bull Michael Jordan, nailing a spectacular reverse lay-up over Karl Malone. Such a shot by such a pro, one not wearing North Carolina blue, might seem a bit incongruous on the back cover of a tome detailing the time-killing four corner offense or the ways in which pace can often devalue defensive statistics, but no one would balk at its placement.
Jordan was Dean Smith’s most famous pupil. The greatest basketball player ever spent his formative years learning under the longtime North Carolina Tar Heel coach, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 83. This is why Jordan, now the owner of the Charlotte Hornets, released this statement on Sunday morning:
“Other than my parents, no one had a bigger influence on my life than Coach Smith. He was more than a coach – he was my mentor, my teacher, my second father. Coach was always there for me whenever I needed him and I loved him for it. In teaching me the game of basketball, he taught me about life. My heart goes out to Linnea and their kids. We’ve lost a great man who had an incredible impact on his players, his staff and the entire UNC family.”
In a league fractured by loyalties to agents, shoe companies, and the unsettling yet understandable impermanence that one-and-done NCAA internships create, the North Carolina family tree remains the NBA’s strongest. Prior to news of Smith’s passing, the biggest NBA story floating around the wires over the weekend was the Sacramento Kings’ chase of George Karl, a former Tar Heel and Smith protégé that has coached five previous NBA teams along with a CBA champion in Albany and the Real Madrid powerhouse.
Karl’s modified zone defense, derived from Smith’s trapping style, has helped him accrue over 1100 NBA wins; yet he’s far from the most celebrated North Carolina NBA influence. The day to day frustrations of running an NBA team may have gotten the best of him at his last few stops, but former Tar Heel point guard Larry Brown has improved teams at each of his professional or NCAA stops as head coach. Brown, currently working at Southern Methodist University, will one day retire as the only man to win titles in the ABA (as a player), the NBA, and the NCAA.
Through Brown and Karl, Smith’s influence continues to dot the NBA landscape.
Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder may have graduated from Duke University, but he made his coaching debut as an assistant under Larry Brown on the 1992-93 Los Angeles Clippers. Portland Trail Blazers coach Terry Stotts developed his ball-movement heavy offense, taking a direct cue from Smith’s work at North Carolina, while working with Karl in both the CBA and in several NBA stops. Oklahoma City Thunder coach Scott Brooks made his NBA coaching debut as an assistant under Karl.
Dallas Mavericks coach head coach Rick Carlisle took in his first head coaching gig under Indiana general manager Donnie Walsh, a former teammate of Brown on North Carolina who has presided over 30 years of basketball in Indiana – only pausing late in the last decade to clean up the mess that the New York Knicks had become, helping that franchise to its first string of postseason appearances in a decade. Former Tar Heel Mitch Kupchak has run the Los Angeles Lakers for nearly 15 years, collecting five rings as an executive. Former Tar Heel Billy Cunningham was the coach when Julius Erving won his only NBA title. Current Tar Heels coach Roy Williams studied under Smith before going on to coach 20 currently active NBA players at both Kansas and North Carolina. The influence runs deep.
Dean Smith’s NBA legacy isn’t limited to the scads of successful coaches that have sprung from North Carolina’s ranks. His Tar Heel offense helped harness Michael Jordan’s significant athletic gifts, helping him learn how to see the floor in ways that went beyond diving toward the rim endlessly in a pell-mell style. Noted for acting as “the only man who could hold Michael Jordan to 20 points” (Jordan’s North Carolina high was “only” 20 points per game in his sophomore season, he averaged over 30 in his NBA career), Smith’s insight helped Jordan develop the patience it took to eventually mate his brilliant basketball gifts with professional teammates who couldn’t even hope to approximate his brilliance, leading to six NBA titles.
In 36 years of coaching at North Carolina, however, Smith’s coaching work influenced far more than the champion that dotted the back cover of his coaching manual. Brown and Cunningham both won ABA championships as star players, with Cunningham winning an NBA title as a player in 1967. Guard Charlie Scott won a ring with the Boston Celtics in 1976, and forward Bobby Jones was a devastating force on several great Denver Nuggets teams (coached by Larry Brown) and a champion with Cunningham on the 1983 Philadelphia 76ers. Mitch Kupchak was a needed inside force on Washington’s 1978 championship team and a reserve on two Laker title-winners.
A younger generation, helmed by stylists as disparate as Vince Carter, Rasheed Wallace, and Antawn Jamison stood as Smith’s last crew to make NBA hay. All three are borderline Basketball Hall of Famers.
Smith’s legacy as a coach and person is just as disparate. An early champion for civil rights, Smith did important and needed work on behalf of young African-Americans in a divided American south in the 1950s and 1960s. In the relatively less important realm of basketball, he was one of the first to introduce advanced analytics into the world of coaching and scouting, emphasizing pace and possession counts as acting as just as structurally important as the raw box score stats most utilized to track just how well a player or team was doing.
As it was in 1997 when he stepped down at North Carolina, there can and will never be a proper summary for his legacy. His accomplishments, sure – line them all up on the side of the page, count the rings, and count the wins.
His legacy? That’s different. That keeps spiraling onward, dotting each and every one of the 30 NBA teams we follow. Few others, if any others, can claim to that.
It is to the unassuming Dean Smith's eternal credit that he would never attempt to claim such a thing on his own. It's our job as basketball fans, in his absence, to do that for him.
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