David Thompson finished where?

During the course of the season, ESPN ran a feature supposedly identifying and honoring the 25 greatest players in college-basketball history. It was an interesting exercise, one that was obviously designed to provoke debate. The problem with debating the choices is that ESPN never really outlined its criteria for selection and ranking. That’s the trouble with a lot of “greatest ever” lists – what is being measured?

The one criterion I heard was that the network was considering only college careers. I want to believe that, but when I see Michael Jordan in the top 20 or Wilt Chamberlain at No. 10, it makes it hard to believe that NBA greatness wasn’t a factor in the rankings.

That’s not to knock Chamberlain, who was a force of nature. He was a two-time first-team All-American. But so was Clyde Lovellette, who played at Kansas four years earlier than Wilt. It was Clyde who led Kansas to the national title – scoring 33 points and pulling down 17 rebounds in the championship game. Wilt came up short in his one try at the title. He only played two years and his second Kansas team failed to win the Big Seven title. His stats are merely marginally better than Lovellette’s.

If Wilt is No. 10, where does Lovellette rank?

Jordan’s case is also interesting. Again, no question he was a great player in his three seasons at North Carolina. As a freshman, he hit the game-winning shot to beat Georgetown in the 1982 title game (although James Worthy was the team’s MVP that season). As a sophomore, he was a consensus first-team All-American and was selected as the national player of the year by The Sporting News. As a junior he was the consensus national player of the year and the third player taken in the NBA draft.

But ...

Jordan’s career is hardly unique. In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to the three-year career of Duke guard Jason Williams. The two put up similar stats – Williams’ career average of 19.3 ppg is slightly better than Jordan’s 17.7; he won two ACC scoring crowns, while Jordan won one. Williams hit the game-clinching 3-pointer as Duke beat Arizona in the 2001 title game. Like Jordan, he was a consensus first-team All-American as a sophomore, winning one major national player of the year award (NABC), and, like Jordan, he was consensus national player of the year as junior. He was selected No. 2 – one spot higher than Jordan – in the NBA draft.

By an interesting coincidence, both Jordan and Williams ended their collegiate careers with an unexpected Sweet 16 loss to Indiana and both were drafted by the Bulls.

The point is that Jordan and Williams had almost exactly the same collegiate careers. Their stats are similar, their teams performed the same and they won the same awards – yet Jordan makes ESPN’s top 15 and Williams is nowhere to be found. Is it possible that the fact that Jordan became the greatest player in NBA history – while Williams’ pro career was cut short by a motorcycle accident – had anything to do with the difference?

It’s hard to come up with unassailable criteria for ranking players. Even if we just consider collegiate accomplishment, what factors deserve the most weight? Stats? Individual awards? Team accomplishments?

For instance, if you weight the first quality most highly, you have to put Pete Maravich and Oscar Robertson very high on your list (and both did make ESPN’s top 5).

“Pistol Pete” was the greatest scorer in NCAA history, averaging 43.8, 44.2 and 44.5 ppg. However, he did that while taking a lot of shots for three very mediocre LSU teams – none of which ever even reached the NCAA Tournament.

It’s interesting that the year after Maravich moved on the NBA, a sophomore at Ole Miss named Johnny Neumann averaged 40.1 ppg – like Pete, playing for a bad team in an SEC that boasted just a handful of good teams in that era.

What does it say about Maravich’s greatness when as forgettable a player as Neumann does almost the same thing at the same time in the same place?

The “Big O” also put up spectacular numbers – averaging almost 34 ppg for his career. You frequently hear that he averaged a triple double, which might be true, although the NCAA didn’t recognize assists in his era.

Robertson played on some good Cincinnati teams, including the 1960 team that finished No. 1 in the final AP poll. Both his 1959 and 1960 teams reached the Final Four, where on both occasions, the Bearcats were knocked out in the semifinals by Pete Newell’s California Bears.

That’s a pretty significant team accomplishment, even if Robertston’s Cincinnati teams did come up just a big short of the prize. Only one problem – the year after Oscar left for the NBA, Cincinnati won the national championship. And a year later, they won again.

If Oscar Robertson is the No. 2 player in college basketball history, where does Tom Thacker, who led the Bearcats to two national titles and a runnerup spot in 1963, rank in the pantheon of the game’s greats?

A few years ago, when I was part of a panel trying to rank the ACC’s greatest players, we grappled with this issue. It’s an issue that’s easy to explore by looking at two of the league’s greatest big men – Virginia’s Ralph Sampson and Duke’s Christian Laettner.

Both were four-year starters almost a decade apart in the ACC. Sampson’s numbers were slightly better – he averaged 16.9 points, 11.4 rebounds and had 462 career blocked shots; Laettner averaged 16.6 points, 7.8 rebounds and had 145 career blocks. Sampson also won more awards – he’s the ACC’s only three-time consensus national player of the year. Laettner was the consensus national player of the year as a senior and wasn’t even a first-team consensus All-American in his first three years.

But there’s one area where Laettner blows Sampson out of the water – NCAA success. No player in NCAA history – with the possible exception of Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – has had as much impact on the NCAA Tournament. As a freshman, Laettner outplayed Georgetown’s Alonzo Mourning in the East Regional title game. As a sophomore, he hit one of the most dramatic shots in NCAA history to beat UConn in another East title game. As a junior, he was Final Four MVP as he led Duke past invincible UNLV and Kansas to its first-ever NCAA title. As a senior, he helped Duke repeat with one of the magical performances in tournament history – 31 points and the dramatic last-second game-winner to beat Kentucky in the regional finals.

Sampson was always frustrated in postseason. Those failures were always blamed on his mediocre teammates, although it’s interesting to note that a year after his departure, Virginia reached the Final Four with freshman Olden Polynice in the middle.

So the question becomes: Does Laettner’s postseason heroics trump Sampson’s regular season superiority?

Unfortunately, the response to that question has to be subjective, depending on the criteria you choose to weight the heaviest.

But when it comes to David Thompson and his place in the basketball universe, there’s nothing subjective about it. The former N.C. State wing player was – almost without debate – the premier player in ACC history. He put all the criteria together. His career scoring average of 26.9 ppg is the highest of any league player who played after the 1950s. He was a three-time consensus All-American, beating out defending national player of the year Bill Walton for AP’s 1974 player-of-the-year award. A year later, he was the unanimous national player of the year.

His teams won big – 27-0 in 1973 when probation kept the Wolfpack out of the NCAA field; 30-1 a year later, when the Pack knocked off Walton and UCLA in the semifinals, snapping the Bruins’ streak of seven straight national titles. Thompson was the Final Four MVP as he led N.C. State past Marquette in the title game.

Fred Schaus, who coached Jerry West at West Virginia, watched Thompson play a freshman game and declared, “Thompson is better right now than Jerry was as a senior.” When N.C. State beat Providence in the ’74 playoffs, All-American Marvin Barnes said he did a good job holding Thompson to 40 points: “Now you know why we call him Superman. I was just trying not to let him get 50.”

When Sports Illustrated conducted a similar poll of the 25 greatest players in college history a few years ago, Thompson finished third behind Alcindor/Jabbar and Robertson. Somehow, in the ESPN poll, he dropped behind such players as Walton (who he beat head-to-head in the 1974 title game), Maravich, Bill Russell and Princeton’s Bill Bradley.

Bill Bradley ahead of David Thompson?

That choice doesn’t go down well in ACC circles.