Dean Smith: A Coach Ahead of His Time

Dean Smith: A Coach Ahead of His Time

From Civil Rights to Basketball Analytics, the Tar Heels Coach Was Fiercely Progressive

By Ben Cohen in the Wall Street Journal

Dean Oliver, a godfather of basketball statistics, published in 1988 what he thought was a pioneering paper. It made the radical point that basketball should be thought of in terms of efficiency, not volume, an insight that inspired the sport’s rapid advances in analytics in recent years. More people now know that the true value of an offense isn’t how many points it scores but how often each possession ends in a basket.

Soon after publishing, though, Oliver realized that the innovation wasn’t as original as he thought. “I found out that the concept had existed for decades already,” Oliver wrote in his book “Basketball on Paper.”

It turns out that a similar idea had been written about in the 1950s. The book was by North Carolina coach Frank McGuire, but the person who wrote the chapters that touched on “points per possession” was one of McGuire’s assistants, a mathematics major who would eventually ascend to the top of college basketball. The author’s name was Dean Smith.

Smith, the celebrated North Carolina men’s basketball coach who died Saturday at the age of 83, was ahead of his time in almost every way. Both on and off the court, he lived with a fiercely progressive streak that was rare in coaches and rarer still in Smith’s era. This was infectious on his Tar Heel teams, and it spread throughout the South during the turbulence of the civil-rights movement.

Smith was a masterful basketball coach, a Hall of Famer who won two national titles and sent more than 50 players to the NBA, including no less an icon than Michael Jordan. But he never acted as if he had all the answers to coaching basketball. Smith’s was a complex mind, capable of many different and contradictory notions, in constant search of the next new thing.

His unusual basketball ideas were—and still are—on display in every North Carolina game. Smith was one of the first coaches to see the value in playing multiple offenses and defenses. He won with styles that could be seen as exact opposites.

When current Tar Heels coach Roy Williams was hired in 2003, for example, one of his first things he did was restore an old strategy from Smith, his coaching mentor, a system of transition basketball so synonymous with the school that it is known as the Carolina break.

Yet one of the many other strategic breakthroughs often credited to Smith couldn’t be more different.

Until the 1980s, Smith’s teams would protect their leads by stalling, dropping back into a “four-corner” offense and holding the ball for as long as they could. It was as ugly—and almost unsporting—as it was effective. Smith took it to the extreme in the 1982 Atlantic Coast Conference championship game against Virginia, when he had North Carolina sit on the ball for nearly the last seven minutes of the game. The Tar Heels turned a 44-43 lead into a 47-45 victory. NCAA coaches subsequently dulled Smith’s edge by voting that spring to experiment with the change they had long resisted: a shot clock. That move resulted in more possessions per game and a faster pace that favored the better team—which was usually North Carolina.

Smith, the son of Baptist schoolteachers in Kansas, also took public stances off the court, even if they were unpopular at the time. Being the coach of North Carolina’s basketball team meant Smith was a demigod in a state that reveres the sport. He used that influence to champion civil rights and other liberal causes in the 1960s and beyond.

Smith recruited to North Carolina the school’s first black scholarship athlete, Charlie Scott, in 1966. He almost single-handedly smashed segregation in Chapel Hill by walking into a restaurant with a black student as an assistant coach at North Carolina not long after schools were integrated.

“You should never be proud of doing what’s right,” he said in 1981. “You should just do what’s right.”

Smith was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, not only for his basketball career but also for his vocal support of social issues. President Barack Obama , who bestowed the award in 2013, said Sunday that Smith “pushed forward the civil-rights movement.”

Smith wasn’t at the White House that day. His family announced in 2010 that he was suffering from a progressive neurocognitive disorder that hindered his memory. The disease was especially painful, people close to him said, because of Smiths' legendary recall and sharp attention to details.

Smith, who coached before computers overtook basketball, was even advanced when it came to numbers. The statistical wave that has swept through sports made metrics like points per possession common among basketball geeks, who have come to understand the game by fusing what they see with what the percentages say. Smith, though, was one of the first to embrace statistics. He was tracking his teams’ points per possession as long ago as the 1950s.

It was Smith’s team-based framework that inspired Oliver to dream up the “Four Factors” of winning basketball: shooting, rebounding, turnovers and free-throw frequency. Oliver heard “points per possession” mentioned on TV broadcasts and realized that Smith’s former players and coaches had absorbed his knowledge and taken it with them everywhere they went.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of giants,” Oliver said Sunday. “He helped pave the way.”