UNC begins bid for third straight Final Four

Four-time All-American Tyler Hansbrough is gone, as are Ty Lawson, last season's ACC Player of the Year, and Wayne Ellington, the Final Four Most Outstanding Player last spring.

And yet, North Carolina forwards Deon Thompson and Ed Davis can't help thinking the party's not over for this follow-up season to the Tar Heels' national basketball championship.

They admit the subject has come up at least three times between them: After back-to-back trips to the Final Four, what would it be like to lead the Tar Heels to a third?

"We've talked about just trying to get back - and even winning another national title - and how much more another one would mean even than last year," said Thompson, whose sixth-ranked team opens its regular season tonight against Florida International. "Because we were a part of it, but we weren't that main part of it."

And if "it" is going to happen again, senior Thompson and sophomore Davis are going to have to play a big part this time.

Only four programs have advanced to at least three straight Final Fours since the tournament field expanded to 64 teams in 1985. (UNC has advanced to three straight before, in 1967, '68 and '69, under Dean Smith when the tournament fields were much smaller.)

For each of those programs, some sort of continuity was key:

Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley teamed to lead Duke to three of its five straight Final Four berths from 1988 to 1992.

In 1998, new Kentucky coach Tubby Smith's Final Four lineup was stuffed with upperclassmen - including Jeff Sheppard and Nazr Mohammed - who had been on Rick Pitino's previous two Final Four teams.

Michigan State reached a third consecutive Final Four in 2001, even after Mateen Cleaves and Morris Peterson left, but they had two players - Charlie Bell and Jason Richardson - who had played on at least one of the previous two teams.

UCLA did the same thing in 2008 when it replaced leading scorer Arron Afflalo with super freshman Kevin Love. The Bruins also had half a dozen players around Love who had played in the team's previous two Final Fours.

Tough task

This season, Carolina may have more of an uphill battle than those teams, considering the firepower it has lost. Four starters - Hansbrough, Lawson, Ellington and Danny Green - are now in the NBA, leaving the Tar Heels with only one true point guard and no proven clutch player. But with one of the top freshman classes in the country and a bevy of big men looking to dominate the lane, they still tied rival Duke as a preseason favorite to win the ACC this season and are considered Final Four favorites by some analysts.

"It's unbelievable to me - it really is," UNC coach Roy Williams said of the expectations. "I told our kids [the rankings are] probably because we made everybody look so bad in '06 that they don't want to get caught that way again."

Williams was referring to the last time UNC won the national title. After its top seven scorers from the 2005 championship team left school, the Tar Heels weren't even picked by Sports Illustrated to make the NCAA field of 65. With a freshman Hansbrough down low, that encore team won 23 games, finished second in the ACC and reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

And this time around, UNC appears to have a deeper team than that 2005-06 club, with two-year starter Thompson (10.6 ppg); preseason All-ACC pick Davis; and senior defensive stopper Marcus Ginyard back after taking a medical redshirt last season.

The Tar Heels also boast a rookie class led by 6-foot-9 John Henson, who will give the Heels a huge front line by playing small forward.

"There's no doubt we lost a lot of great players," sophomore point guard Larry Drew II said. "But we gained some pretty good ones, too."

Concerns remain, however, in the backcourt, where Drew (1.3 ppg, 9.6 minutes per game last season) is the only true ballhandler on the team.

He will be backed up by combo guard Dexter Strickland and Ginyard, who has played four positions in his college career.

Junior Will Graves, who was suspended most of last season, is considered the best outside shooter on the team. But back troubles have kept him out of the shape Williams would have preferred entering the season.

And then there's the biggest question mark out there: Without Hansbrough, Lawson and Ellington, just who is UNC's go-to guy?

"We do have a few more people with Deon and Marcus and Ed who have had some significant playing time, but ... no one on this team has been asked to do it at crunch time," Williams said. "Nobody's ever been asked to do it when the other team's defense was aimed at stopping them.

"... Guys are going to learn about themselves in the next two to three weeks. That will hopefully be positive for us."

Because of his team's relative inexperience, Williams, who has been to the Final Four five of the past eight years with Kansas and UNC, said he doesn't know if it's realistic to think that the Tar Heels will get back for the third straight time. But he admits "it would be fantastic."

Thompson and Davis aren't done talking about it. But now it's up to them to help their team follow the three-peat ways of Duke, Kentucky, Michigan State and UCLA.

"Every team wants to be the best, and that's what we're aiming for," Davis said. "We want to be No. 1."

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