Someone once said of Jeff Hornacek, the clear No. 3 on the late-90s Utah Jazz teams that went to two NBA Finals as foils against the latter-day Jordan Bulls, “If he’s your third wheel, you’ve got yourself a hell of a tricycle.”
Teams with great players tend to have a better chance of winning than teams without great players.
That’s right y’all: just $30 a year for that nugget of wisdom.
To win a title though; that takes a little more. Title teams have great players; they also have guys who
[deep sigh]
[adopts coach-speak]
do all the little things, make their teammates better, limit mistakes and make their living on the margins of winning and losing and are also able to hold their own on both ends of the floor and take some burden off the primary guys with no fall off in production, while checking their egos at the door and elevating/supplementing the play of the clear alpha dogs.
But not to spoil the point, the team with the best dudes do win a lot. Hornacek never did win a title with those Jazz teams, after all.
Does every team in college basketball have a clear third banana making everything easier for everyone? No. Does every champion in college basketball have that guy? Also no. Sometimes they don’t need that guy. 2018 Villanova didn’t need that guy; when you have Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges and Donte Divencenzo, you’re all good regardless and to call Divencenzo a third wheel would be an insult to how instrumental he was to that team. But when those guys were freshmen on that 2016 team? They had one of those dudes and we’ll get into him below.
Let’s travel in time since the turn of the century to revisit some amazing examples of players who contributed to title teams with some real Hornacek-ian vibes emanating from their third option.