No. 4: Billy Cunningham

Every offseason, we run historical ranking series focusing on North Carolina basketball and football.

The purpose each spring isn’t to make declarative statements, but to have fun offering a subjective look at the best teams and players ever at Carolina. This effort is to generate discourse, debate, and take UNC fans down memory lane.

This season, we are doing something a little different, combining football and basketball, as we offer our take on the Top 40 UNC football and basketball players of all time. The criteria is quite simple: The process includes playing careers with the Tar Heels and professionally, other relevant impacts they’ve had on their sports, coaching, and championships. We also gave a lean toward all UNC accomplishments.

So, this isn’t a UNC-only list, a pro-only list, or a straight up purely best ever list. Some Tar Heels on this list didn’t have great pro careers but were so good and historic at UNC, they simply had to make the cut. Some on this list weren’t stars at UNC, but had outstanding and/or highly distinguished pro careers, that it warranted their place among these 40 athletes.

We hope you enjoy the list and feel free to disagree, as we know many will.

We continue our countdown with:

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The Kangaroo Kid was a two-time All-America, 1965 ACC player of the Year, three-time All-ACC, a stat-stuffing machine and his UNC jersey No. 32 is honored in the Smith Center. And, he could be the most underrated Carolina basketball player, and perhaps athlete, of all time.

Cunningham has the second highest career scoring average ever at UNC at 24.8 points per contest and the highest career rebounding average at 15.4. He also has the fifth, seventh, and ninth highest single-season scoring averages in school history plus he has single-game highs of 48 points in Dec. 1964 and 27 rebounds versus Clemson in Feb. 1963. Cunningham is fourth all-time at UNC with 1,062 career rebounds and he recorded a double-double in an NCAA-record 40 consecutive games.

Dean Smith’s first star player, Cunningham is remembered for ripping down from a tree Smith hanging in effigy after a loss at Wake Forest in 1965. An academic All-America, he was named in 2003 as one of the ACC’s 50 greatest players of all time.

Professionally, he was the No. 5 overall pick in the 1965 Draft by the Philadelphia 76ers, and was a four-time NBA All-Star, named to the NBA All-Rookie team, was an ABA All-Star, ABA MVP in 1973, an NBA champion in 1967, named to the NBA’s 50th Anniversary All-Time team, and his jersey No. 32 is retired by the Philadelphia 76ers.

In addition, as an NBA head coach with the Sixers, he led them to the championship in 1983 and was the head coach of four NBA All-Star teams.

Cunningham scored 16,310 career points in the ABA and NBA averaging 21.2 points per contest, grabbed 7,981 rebounds (10.4 average) and handed out 3,305 assists (4.3 average).

He’s enshrined in the College Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Hall of Fame.