Our All-Time State Team Can Whip Your All-Time State Team’s Butt

In recent years, as the population of North Carolina has gone up so has the overall level of talent. And it got us to thinking about this: what states are close to NC in talent? Just consider who has come out of the Old North State:

• Sam Jones
• Walt Bellamy
• David Thompson
• Tom Burleson
• Bob McAdoo
• John Lucas
• Walter Davis
• Phil Ford
• Cedric “Cornbread” Maxwell
• James Worthy
• Michael Jordan
• Buck Williams
• Dominique Wilkins
• Brad Daugherty
• Chris Paul
• Antawn Jamison
• Steph Curry
• Rodney Rogers
• John Wall
• Bam Adebayo
• Brandon Ingram

You could take any 13 and put that group up against the best of any other state. New York would have a great team obviously, starting with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dr. J, Connie Hawkins, Chris Mullins, Tiny Archibald...

California would have Bill Walton, Kawhi Leonard, Bill Russell, the Ball Brothers, Reggie Miller, Jason Kidd...they’d have a claim.

And Pennsylvania, Virginia and Michigan would all have great teams, South Carolina and Indiana too (Indiana would have Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, Sean Kemp and George McGinnis).

Even so.

We’d probably take Thompson, Jordan, Worthy, Daugherty, Curry, Lucas, Williams, Burleson, Lucas, Rogers, Ford, Wilkins and Jameson.

Jordan and Thompson alone would devastate most defenses. However you slice it though, the NC team would be loaded.