IT was redemption time for the University of North Carolina as the Tar Heels made up for their 77-74 finals loss to the Villanova University Wildcats a year ago with a 71-65 victory over the Gonzaga University Bulldogs in the championship game of the 79th U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I men’s basketball tournament for their sixth national crown in program history.
Joel Bery II, a 6-foot junior point guard, chalked up 22 points and earned the Final Four Most Outstanding Player award despite a forgettable 2-for-14 field shooting and 11 markers in the Tar Heels’ 77-76 semifinal win over Oregon two days earlier. A banged-up Berry had been plagued by a pair of sprained ankles (right then left) entering the Final Four.
Berry averaged more than 14 points, three assists and three rebounds for the Tar Heels this season.
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Triple-double performances have been in the vogue in the National Basketball Association this season.
Oklahoma City’s 6-foot-3 wunderkind Russell Westbrook leads the league with 41 triple-doubles – duplicating the all-time NBA single-season mark set by Oscar Robertson of the Cincinnati Royals (the predecessors of the Sacramento Kings) during the 1961-62 season.
That year, the Big O, the first big-sized point guard in NBA history at 6-foot-5, also became the first player ever to average a triple-double for an entire campaign – 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists in 79 games.
After 55 years, the 28-year-old Westbrook is virtually assured of being the second NBAer to turn in the trick with norms of a league-leading 31.6 points, 10.7 rebounds and 10.4 assists (with five games remaining, including today’s road encounter against Memphis) for the sixth-seeded, playoffs-bound Thunder in the first year of the post-Kevin Durant era.
Next to Westbrook on the NBA T-D list are Houston’s James Harden (20) and Cleveland’s LeBron James (12). There have been 110 triple-double performances so far in the NBA this season – far outdistancing the old record of 78 set during the 1988-89 season when the Los Angeles Lakers’ Earvin “Magic” Johnson and Chicago’s Michael Jordan led the way with 17 and 15, respectively.
In the 79-year history of the U.S. National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division men’s basketball competitions, there has not been any player that normed a triple-double in a single tournament.
The closest was Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who registered five-game averages of 21.8 points, 8.8 rebounds and 10 assists (unofficially, though) in leading Michigan State past Larry Bird and Indiana State in the 1979 tournament finals. Johnson was voted the Final Four Most Outstanding Player that year.
Note that assists were not an official stat until the 1984-85 season and steals and blocks were not officially kept on a national basis until the 1986-87 campaign.
An estimated 35.1 million people tuned in to the game. That still stands as the most watched NCAA basketball game of all time. I was able to witness the 1979 NCAA titular match on a delayed basis after my brother in the States sent in a Betamax copy of the historic contest.
Unofficially, there were three triple-doubles posted in the NCAA Final Four. Those who accomplished the feat were Kansas’ B.H. Horn vs. Indiana (68-69, 1953 finals – 26 points, 15 rebounds and 13 blocked shots), Cincinnati’s Oscar Robertson vs. Louisville (1959 third-place game – 39 points, 17 rebounds and 10 assists), and Michigan State’s Earvin Johnson vs. Pennsylvania (1979 semifinals – 29 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists).
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