Dean Smith would have smiled at Virginia’s championship

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No one needs any explanation or recollection of the many times and many ways in which college basketball people — within or outside the ACC — knocked the playing style and overall aesthetic of the Virginia Cavaliers over the years. We have gone down that road so many times. You don’t need a rehash of that.

What I find worth remembering in a larger ACC context, after Virginia’s thrilling win over Texas Tech in a classic national championship game on Monday night, is a famous line about one of the two best ACC basketball coaches of all time.

When identifying the two best ACC basketball coaches in history, there is no debate: It’s Mike Krzyzewski of Duke and Dean Smith of North Carolina. Roy Williams might win four or even five national titles before he is done, but Dean Smith mentored him and made North Carolina everything it is, and was, and continues to be. Coach Smith made all this possible, and he established the gold standard for Coach K to aspire to.

Imagine if Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic win more major titles than Roger Federer. Would that mean they are better than Federer? You could make the case… but the underappreciated argument about Federer’s all-time greatness is that he was the first man to throw down a higher standard. If Federer had not arrived, Nadal and Djokovic would not have become the players they have become. That’s Dean Smith in ACC basketball. It’s him and Coach K, even though Roy has more national titles than his mentor.

So, about that line…

The old line about Dean Smith is that he was the one man who could regularly hold Michael Jordan under 20 points per game.

The reference was to Smith’s emphasis on team play and team concepts, the Carolina Way in which everyone got involved and playing the right way. Dean Smith created a culture of basketball which his coaching tree turned into elite accomplishments. The Carolina Way is not some vague notion. “Playing the right way” is something which a Smith disciple, Larry Brown, turned into an NBA championship with the team-oriented Detroit Pistons in 2004.

The soul of Dean Smith — caring more about team concepts than individual brilliance — might seem on the surface to have been a constraint, but we can obviously see that Jordan, and James Worthy, and Sam Perkins, and so many other Carolina guys from the 1980s and other decades became very successful NBA players — greater, one should note, than so many of the players Coach K turned out at Duke during the time when both Smith and Krzyzewski coached against each other. Duke’s 2001 title team with Mike Dunleavy Jr. and Shane Battier produced a few longtime NBA success stories, but Bobby Hurley and Christian Laettner didn’t have the durable careers from Duke’s back-to-back national champions which Smith cultivated from that supreme crop of talent in the early 1980s.

The point is plain enough to see and appreciate: Dean Smith equipped his players for the pros. The playing style might have felt like a restraint, but it impressed upon Carolina players the need to master the sport’s nuances and let individual excellence flow from understanding.

That ethos — albeit in a different package — is very much apparent in how Tony Bennett teaches basketball at Virginia. Malcolm Brogdon showed how completely he was prepared for the NBA by Bennett. I see in Ty Jerome a player who is likely to have a long and solid NBA career as a result of how he has been taught by Bennett. De’Andre Hunter’s second half showed what he can become.

These players might have been held back stylistically, but they have been given a first-rate basketball education by a man who — as his own father, Dick Bennett, has acknowledged — has surpassed his dad as a coach before turning 50 years old.

They said Virginia’s style couldn’t win in March. They said this style was holding players back. They said this style was bad for basketball.

Dean Smith, the man who held Michael Jordan under 20 points, would have called this out for the bullsh** it is today. In heaven, where the sky is Carolina blue, Smith might not be thrilled with Virginia orange dominating the national championship scene, but a part of Dean Smith is certainly relishing how team-oriented play has been vindicated on such a large scale in college basketball.

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