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Message: [QUOTE="Gurleyman, post: 4615698, member: 175"] I go with 1999. They had a tendency to let teams hang around a bit too much (see Seton Hall in the BET, the Pitt game with KEA on the scorer's table, a UMass game that was too close for comfort - although Rip had a deep thigh bruise early in the year that slowed him down before he got into good form, which made the Pitt and UMass games a little closer). But that team could put clamps on you down the stretch like no team I've ever seen - and had two guys who could get you a bucket. The Miami loss I want to say were down 9 and completely shut them down in the last five minutes to tie it. And then the winning basket was Tim James reading an airball and laying it in (ironically they could have lost to Miami the other time on a weird defensive lapse leaving someone - Salmons maybe - wide, wide open for the winning 3 off an inbounds play, but he missed). We might have won that Cuse game without Rip and Jake, if it wasn't such a sudden surprise with no time to prepare on a Big Monday after that big win at St. John's on Saturday. They were flat and didn't know how to attack the zone, but they took that L, had more time to prepare, and went on the road to play top-5 Stanford without Rip and it was something like 25-5 early (they had to hang on, but they were a buzzsaw early). In the last five minutes of games, they just would not let you score (Duke's one bucket was a scramble off an offensive rebound that got kicked out to Langdon when Ricky went to chase it). The '04 team at peak probably had a higher ceiling than '99 due to the variety of weapons - see Alabama Elite Eight game for Exhibit A when Okafor sat and they dropped 50 in the first half anyway. Crazy thing about '04 is that we had a glaring weakness (not related to Okafor's back). After Marcus Williams was academically ineligible, Taliek and Ben were are only ballhandlers, and if one got in foul trouble (or god forbid, injured), we were very vulnerable. But they never had to be too aggressive guarding the ball with the rim protection behind them and we masked it. I might argue that the most talented team was 94, but too young and no big game experience cost them (NIT the year before). They played really tight in the tourney. The 95 team went to No. 1, and the 94 team was the same team plus Donyell Marshall, who was a 25 ppg scorer and third in the NPOY race. The 2009 team might have taken that mantle if Dyson and Sticks had any significant time being active simultaneously. [/QUOTE]

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