Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 18, 1992 TAG: 9201180249
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUG DOUGHTY SPORTSWRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CAVS COACHING JOB INTERESTED MACLEOD
John MacLeod may have surprised some basketball observers when he returned to college coaching after 18 years in the National Basketball Association, but Notre Dame wasn't the first college job that interested him.MacLeod said earlier this week that he met with Virginia athletic director Jim Copeland when UVa was looking for a head coach during the winter of 1990.
"Jim and I talked down in Dallas," MacLeod said. "We had lunch. It was very informal."
MacLeod was out of a job at the time, having been fired by the Dallas Mavericks after 11 games of the 1989-90 season.
"I didn't make a special trip," Copeland said Friday. "I think I was there for the NCAA Convention [in early January]. I had gotten a call from a friend of his who said he might be interested."
Copeland said it was his impression that MacLeod wasn't sure he wanted to get out of pro coaching. Indeed, MacLeod was named head coach of the New York Knicks before the next season.
"He was on my list before we talked," Copeland said, "but it was all very exploratory. There may have been one piece of correspondence after that."
MacLeod, who was the head coach at Oklahoma from 1967-73, said he has found his return to college basketball refreshing, but said he misses the pace of the NBA.
"The biggest adjustment for me is the lack of games," said MacLeod, whose Fighting Irish will visit Virginia today at 2 p.m. "If I were a pro coach, counting the preseason, we'd have played 43 or 44 games by now. The Virginia game will be our 11th.
"Another big change is the 3-point line, which is 23 [feet] 9 [inches] in the pros, as compared to 19-9 in college. In the pro game, you want to make a team shoot from outside. Here, everybody shoots the 3-pointer because it's so darn close."
That's not to say MacLeod wants to move the arc farther from the basket.
"It's the reason college basketball is the way it is; that, and the shot clock," MacLeod said. "I would watch college games seven or eight years ago and, with 12 or 13 minutes left, a lot of teams would go into a stall. The game was slipping."
\ MacLeod says his team has not played zone defense for one possession in 12 games. He has assigned freshman Billy Taylor the responsibility for guarding Bryant Stith, who scored 17 points in the last 3:14 of Virginia's 68-67 victory over the Irish last year in South Bend, Ind.
Stith is playing his best basketball of the season, with 75 points in the past three games. He had a season-high 28 points Tuesday night, when he was 12-of-23 from the field in a 75-71 loss to Georgia Tech - only the second time this season he has taken more than 15 shots.
"That's something we had talked about," coach Jeff Jones said. "He chose not to shoot a couple of times [against Georgia Tech] when he was about 12 feet from the basket, or else he could have taken 28 shots. He's calling for the ball, even demanding the ball at times, which is good."
Stith, who had failed to shoot 50 percent from the field in a 15-game stretch dating to last season, has made more than half of his shots in three straight games.
\ NOTES: Stith, with 2,069 points in his UVa career, ranks 19th on the ACC all-time scoring list. He needs 249 points - in a minimum of 16 games - to break Jeff Lamp's school record. . . . UVa center Ted Jeffries, a junior, had not played more than 35 minutes in a college game before he logged 42 minutes in the Cavaliers' 77-68 overtime victory over Florida State. Jeffries played 38 minutes against Georgia Tech and grabbed a season-high 10 rebounds. . . . Freshman Yuri Barnes, whose playing time has increased since New Year's, has 14 rebounds in 35 minutes in four ACC games. . . . Freshmen Junior Burrough and Cory Alexander both have struggled with their shots in ACC play. Burrough is 19-of-48 against league opponents, including 6-of-23 the past two games, and Alexander is 15-of-43. . . . Sophomore Corey Stewart and freshman Chris Alexander have not played in the past 10 games and freshman Jason Williford has played one minute over that span.