Right on schedule

Sporting News, The, Jan 8, 1996 by Michael Knisley

It started last season, when Iverson was a freshman. Harrington's scoring average dropped 2.5 points per game and his rebounding average went down by 2. This year, his numbers are down even further, until now, as a senior, Harrington is almost an afterthought. Thompson knows Iverson is a special player on the perimeter, but he also knows where the big games are won. Against Arizona, for instance, Iverson scored 40, Harrington 4 and the Hoyas lost by 10.

"We're a lot more perimeter-oriented now, more so than we've been in a while," Thompson says. "But in order for us to be successful, we need to incorporate the frontcourt a lot more into what we,re doing. I feel that's coming, but I don't know that ifs where we need to have it. I think we're a good team now. I think we can be a very good team if we're able to bring along our frontcourt play and incorporate it into what we're doing more."

Thompson throws in a quick reminder, though, that the school's all-time leading scorer is neither Ewing nor Mutombo nor Harrington. It is Eric (Sleepy) Floyd, a very snazzy perimeter player for the Hoyas from 1978 through '82.

Still missing in action

For various reasons, we still haven't seen a handful of the nation's better players. Now that the New Year and conference games are upon us, look for life from these stars, all of whom have been sidelined so far (with the exception of LSU's Randy Livingston, who managed to limp back from a knee injury just before the holidays):

Tremaine Fowlkes, 6-7, Cal, suspended

Randy Livingston, 6-4, LSU, knee

Moochie Norris, 6-1, Auburn, suspended

Rabbits out of the hat

Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace go away, and you gotta figure Dean Smith presses a little to keep the Tar Heels' 31-year streak of top three ACC finishes alive. You gotta figure North Carolina has more than one loss entering ACC play this week.

But maybe you didn't figure on Vince Carter and Antawn Jamison so soon. No one in Chapel Hill seems to remember the last time Smith started two freshmen on a regular basis, except that it probably was about the same time Junior Johnson was bootlegging hootch through the Carolina woods. They do remember the last time two freshmen started a season opener for the Tar Heels, as Jamison and Carter did this year. That happened November 21, 1987, when Rick Fox and Pete Chilcutt started in the Tip-off Classic against Syracuse. But they were in the lineup only because J.R. Reid and Steve Bucknall were serving one-game suspensions for an offseason fight.

Carter and Jamison are there all the time, including now in ACC action. And North Carolina still shoots lights-out, even with the freshmen on the floor. The Tar Heels have shot at least 50 percent from the field in 23 of the last 25 years, and they're hovering right there again.

Which doesn't mean that Smith, the game's smoothest naysayer, can't find something about which to complain. After Carolina shot 53.5 percent from the floor in a 17-point victory at Pitt in December, he said, "Even when we had a Michael Jordan ... you could see that when he was a freshman he had trouble making the outside shot. We'll have to play with a lot of control this year, but we'll improve."