All posts by Dane Huffman

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High picks continue for the Triangle, UNC

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It wasn’t long ago when high picks in the baseball draft were rare in this area, but that’s not the case now. The University of North Carolina has been stuffing the draft with top picks, and that trend continued Monday.

Tar Heels pitcher Matt Harvey was the seventh pick overall, to the New York Mets.

Carolina now has 12 first-round picks in school history, and five – Daniel Bard, Andrew Miller, Dustin Ackley and Alex White – were picked since 2006.

Bard has a 2.03 ERA for Boston as a reliever this season. Marlins prospect Miller has struggled in AA ball. The Mariners tried Ackley at second base, but he struggled to hit. He is back at first base now, his position at UNC, but is still hitting just .251 with one homer and 18 RBI for Double-A West Tennessee.

White, a Cleveland Indians prospect, is 2-1 for Akron in the Double-A Eastern League, with an ERA of 1.83.

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Watching expansion go by

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The ACC finds itself in a far different position today than seven years ago when the league was at the forefront of the latest expansion wave.

This year, the Pac-10, Big 10 and Big 12 are in major play with a number of scenarios possible. The Pac-10 is poised to add between two and six teams, poaching from the Big 12. Nebraska and Missouri seem destined to join the Big 10, maybe by the end of the week.

Big 12 commissioner Dan Beebe must feel like his league is so much sand running through his fingers. It’s disintegrating before our eyes.

Meanwhile, John Swofford is forced to be a bit player in this latest high-stakes game. The ACC simply can’t match the massive TV revenues of the current SEC or expanded Pac-10 and Big 10. While the Big Ten Network has a high ceiling for growth depending upon which markets it adds, the ACC’s TV contract with ESPN/ABC doesn’t allow it to immediately profit from new markets.

One possibility for the ACC would be to head north and pick up a couple of Big East leftovers if that league is raided by the Big 10. Given the revenue disparity, there’s no chance any SEC teams would consider joining the ACC.

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Lessons from John Wooden

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John Wooden’s phone number is still listed, and you can easily find it on whitepages.com. In an age where sports figures are increasingly remote, the fact that anyone, at any time, can call the legendary UCLA coach is amazing.

The news that Wooden, 99, is gravely ill reminds us an era is closing.

Longtime ACC basketball fans loathed and respected Wooden, who dominated college basketball through 1975. If you followed the sport then, you feared the man with the rolled-up program and old-school discipline.

N.C. State’s monumental victory over UCLA in the 1974 national semifinals – the Pack won the championship two nights later, against Marquette – remains one of the epic games in collegiate history. Wooden retired after winning the 1975 title.

I had a chance to speak with him once. I was stunned when I called and he answered the phone, taking time to talk to a young News & Observer reporter. He patiently answered my questions on college basketball, and we veered off into talk about that 1974 season.

Wooden, in a soft deep voice grown richer with age, spoke of how much he admired that N.C. State team. In basketball, he said, you need quickness and balance. And N.C. State had both.

But what I remembered from that conversation was not what he said about N.C. State, but how he related basketball to life.

In life, he said, you need love and balance. Those words came through the phone with grace and clarity and I knew that even though I was a random reporter who happened to call when he was home, he was still coaching, still teaching, still doing what he loved.

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Penny-pinching time for Canes

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That horrible sound heard around the Triangle Wednesday was the sound of Carolina Hurricanes fans groaning at the thought what lies ahead next season.

Canes owner Peter Karmanos, Jr., and team general manager Jim Rutherford conducted separate interviews with local media. But both focused on the same thing — the bottom line.

Karmanos, who is attempting to sell a minority share of the team, sat down with the News and Observer. Rutherford, currently out of the state, had a phone interview with 99.9FM The Fan.

They both said the Canes payroll for next season will be in the bottom 20 percent of the NHL. That, most likely, means good-bye to fan favorites Ray Whitney and Rod Brind’Amour.

The Canes will attempt to sign Whitney before their exclusive negotiating period with him ends on July 1. But what kind of serious effort can they make while, at the same time, attempting to trim $15 million from last season’s $56 million payroll?

Brind’Amour, who’ll turn 40 this summer, wants to play next season in the final year of the 5-year extension he signed after Carolina won the Stanley Cup in 2006. It would be a feel-good swansong for No. 17.

But, again, the Canes will have a hard time fitting his salary into their slimmed-down budget. Brind’Amour is due $3 million, but the team would owe him a $2 million buyout should it release him. Maybe the two sides can reach a compromise.

Either way, this will be tough to watch. It may get even tougher when the games on the ice begin this fall.

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Classy Danowski deserves this title at Duke

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Say what you want about the Duke lacrosse team in light of the 2006 allegations, but this much is true – current coach John Danowski exudes class, and you can’t help but admire what Danowski and his club accomplished with Monday’s national title.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how former coach Mike Pressler was treated unfairly when Duke forced him out in that aborted season.

Duke responded with an amazing hire when it brought in Danowski from Hofstra. Danowski not only knows the game, he knows how to recruit and he knew how to handle a scandal of hard to fathom proportions. To keep the Duke program afloat is a remarkable achievement – to win a national title, and to do it after such wrenching Final Four losses, is amazing.

In light of the false allegations that surrounded the program in 2006, it’s amazingly just to see the Devils finally claim a national title in a sport dominated by a tight circle of programs.

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Suite life at Kenan Stadium includes beer, wine

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The University of North Carolina is looking to sell luxury seats in the new Kenan Stadium end zone, and the Tar Heels are using a familiar tactic to draw fans.

Beer.

Yep, you’re not allowed to take alcohol into Kenan Stadium – wouldn’t want that on a college campus – but to help sell seats in the new end zone, the school will sell beer and wine to donors who can afford seats that start at $750, according to The News & Observer.

It’s a five-story, $70 million project that will rip down the old fieldhouse in Kenan and fill it with upscale seating.

You can’t help but be a bit sad about the coming changes – the old fieldhouse adds to the quaint and historic feel of Kenan. But you have to admit the additions to Kenan in recent decades have made the stadium even more impressive.

The new addition in the endzone should be first-rate as well. But the fact that the school will allow the sales of alcohol there is, well, amusing. And it’s a reminder of the uneasy, and inconsistent, relationship collegiate sports have with alcohol.

A UNC student who can walk home to Teague dorm would be pilloried for heading into the stadium with a can of Budweiser. But an alum who knocks down beers in a suite and then drives back to Greensboro … well, that’s another matter.

By the way, News14 has a story on the new facility here.

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Wears leaving for UCLA a reminder of risk

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Roy Williams had success recruiting in California as the head coach at Kansas, and he has continued to mine that state since coming to North Carolina. In fact, Williams had four Californians on his roster last season.

But the transfer of the Wear twins is a reminder that bringing kids from across the country can be risky, especially in an era where players are less loyal than before. The Wears are transferring to UCLA, they announced Tuesday, to be back in their home state. Williams also had another Californian return home when Alex Stepheson left for Southern Cal after the 2008 season.

Stepheson and the Wears weren’t great players at UNC, but the moves are a reminder that it can be tough for kids to adjust to being 2,500 miles from home. And Carolina has had to scramble for bodies with the Wears leaving, a move Williams said caught him totally off-guard.

UNC had rarely signed Californians before Williams arrived, with center Scott Williams of Hacienda Heights being one of the few exceptions.

Duke, too, had Los Angeles product Jamal Boykin depart for California.

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Canes selling a part of franchise

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The Carolina Hurricanes have long needed a local ownership connection, and now apparently, that could happen.

The Sports Business Journal is reporting the Canes have hired Allen and Co. to sell 50 percent of the club. The Canes are owned by Peter Karmanos, and his key partner, Tom Thewes, died two years ago. The News and Observer’s Chip Alexander reached Karmanos on the phone Monday, and Karmanos said he had not said “50 percent.”

But he did tell Alexander he would prefer a local investor.

“It would make sense to have a partner that lives and works in the Raleigh area,” Karmanos said.

The Canes are long past any thought of relocating from Raleigh, but the fact that Karmanos is open to sharing the club is major news. Many have thought the Canes would have benefited in the beginning by having a local investor involved – it simply took a while for Carolina to adapt to its new home and the realities of being in a major collegiate market.

The risk here is that any new owner, particular one from outside the market, could mean changes for the franchise. The sell is coming at a time when Carolina has a strong young core of players and will host the All-Star Game this season. But if half the team is owned by outside investors, and the franchise struggles in future years, there is no telling what that means.

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Greensboro can own ACC Baseball Tournament

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The College World Series has a home in Omaha, but the ACC Baseball Tournament, by comparison, is a nomad.

The ACC event deserves better. It spent the 2006, ’07 and ’08 years in Jacksonville, Fla., a nice place to play baseball but a long way most parts of the league.

Then the event was scheduled to be in Fenway Park in 2009. But – whoops! – the Red Sox realized the Green Monster was booked that weekend, and had to ask for this year instead. Once the economy tanked, the ACC moved the 2010 tournament to Greensboro for financial reasons while saying that some day, some day it will play the event in Fenway.

The allure of Fenway is obvious, but there’s no way the tournament will draw much interest in New England. Finding a community that can support it – and maybe Greensboro will – makes more sense.

The Triangle should be a great fit, with three teams here and two fine minor league parks. But the event gets overlooked in the market when the Carolina Hurricanes are in the playoffs, as they were last year. The event still drew 36,639 at Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the ninth-highest total in the event’s history, but there just wasn’t much buzz with the Canes dominating sports talk.

Greensboro makes more sense. The city has now a great minor league park in NewBridge Bank Park and it has a chance to claim this event as its own. That’s what happened with the CWS, with Omaha showing such enthusiasm for the event that others don’t have a chance.

This is Greensboro’s turn to make this an annual affair, which opens Wednesday. And if the city can show the tournament the love it deserves, it should keep it.

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Roy Williams to head home for 2011 opener

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Here’s an interesting note from Ken Tysiac of the Raleigh News & Observer – North Carolina will open its 2011-12 basketball season at UNC-Asheville as UNC-A unveils a new arena.

Williams, of course, is from Asheville, and he has shown a willingness to play in a new arena early. This past season Carolina played at the new Dallas Cowboys stadium, losing to Texas, and the College of Charleston’s new arena.

That Charleston game in particular was a big night … for Charleston. UNC lost and that game may have contributed to the downward spiral of the season.