Hansbrough vs. Griffin is historic matchup
Mar 28, 2009
Tags: ACC
When top seed North Carolina and second-seeded Oklahoma play on Sunday, it should be an incredible game between two teams that each spent a portion of the season as the No. 1 team in the country. When the brackets came out, most people thought that this game really could look like a national championship. Both teams have been that good.
But this game will be more than just a game for the right to play in the Final Four; it has some historical significance as well. About a week ago I started to wonder if two national players of the year had ever met up in the tournament. Tyler Hansbrough was last seasons POY, and Oklahoma's Blake Griffin has already collected at least one national player of the year award, and is considered a lock by most to garner the rest of this season's individual hardware. I posed the question to North Carolina's media relations folks, but they weren't willing to start investigating because the Heels hadn't handled their business against Gonzaga yet. After the win Friday night, Carolina's Matt Bowers told me he would start to figure it out.
When North Carolina arrived for interviews today, we immediately got out the NCAA tournament record books to see just how rare a meeting this was. I knew it hadn't happened often, but had no idea the company that Hansbrough and Griffin will join on Sunday.
We worked our way back through the last decade, then the 90's, then the 80's. More media folks started to gather around and get really interested in what we were talking about. When we finally found the last time it happened, it put some great perspective on what we will get to see.
In 1974 UCLA's Bill Walton was the reigning player of the year and he faced N.C. State's David Thompson at the Final Four in Greensboro. That game was one of the most memorable in NCAA history as Thompson and the Wolfpack ended the Bruins' reign over college basketball and handed Walton the most painful loss of his career.
After finding the Walton-Thompson meeting, we started to look to see if it had happened again. It turns out that it had, but only once more and it involved two more of the greatest players ever. In 1968, Houston's big man Elvin Hayes and UCLA's legendary center Lew Alcindor squared off two times. The first game helped put college basketball on the map. The Bruins brought a 47-game winning streak to Houston, where the game was played in the Astrodome in front of a crowd of more than 53,000.fans. Hayes and the Cougars pulled off the upset, but Alcindor and the Bruins would win the rematch which came in the Final Four. UCLA would go on to win the national championship, and Alcindor would change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and become one of the greatest players of all time.
I'm not saying that Griffin vs. Hansbrough will have half the impact of either of the previous two meetings between players of the year, but it's hard to deny the significance of the meeting simply because it so rarely happens. In these days where players are so good so young and usually take their games to the next level after receiving such an award, I say enjoy this match-up Sunday, because it might never happen again.
