Debuts for Final 17 Great Teams Starts with Edey vs. 1948 NYU

Our 234 All-Time Great Men's teams, listed alphabetically here with records and average scores in our game, have combined for 269 games played leaving only these 17 teams listed yet to have played. Our primary focus is always to play every new team created at least once to catch any mistakes - a missing player, stamina that doesn't add up, a player seemingly out of position etc.

The following shows where each team ranks among our 234 all-time great teams - with UNC's Bob McAdoo team the highest ranked at 39th of all time and about +4 points better than the average great team in our game. the 2024 Purdue team is the only team from this season in the top 100 all time (since we already have the UConn 2023 team which ranked 7th of all time) and comes in at 27th place at one point higher than that UNC team at +5.
 

Prev	Team	Year	Top Player (top 75 all-time?)	Rating
164	Arizona St.	2009	James Harden #33	-6
166	California	1993	Jason Kidd #36	-6
152	Colorado St.	2024	Isaiah Stevens	-5
221	Duquesne	2024	Jimmy Clark	-15
227	Gonzaga	1981	John Stockton #25	-16
213	Grand Canyon	2024	Tyon Grant-Foster	-12
168	Louisville	1968	Wes Unseld #60	-6
230	Massachusetts	1971	Julius Erving #19	-18
189	NC State	2024	D.J. Burns	-7
39	North Carolina	1972	Bob McAdoo #54	+4
232	NYU	1948	Dolph Schayes #61	-19
234	Oakland	2024	Jack Gohlke	-20
174	Oregon St.	1990	Gary Payton #48	-6
27	Purdue	2024	Zach Edey	+5
207	Utah St.	2024	Great Osobor	-10
231	Weber St.	2010	Damian Lillard #68	-18
226	Yale	2024	Danny Wolf	-15

We started one tournament of a bunch of newer teams from the last few years a while ago, but then moved our attention to a tournament of all the teams we added to the game because they featured one of the best players of all-time but had not been in the game.

The bracket at the bottom of the games played so far among those 26 teams. Nine of those teams had yet to play, but we decided to mix up that tournament a bit when we chose the eight 2024 teams to add to the game, we decided to match them up with eight of the great players teams so that we wouldn't be playing 2024 teams against each other in this round.

The debut for the 1972 UNC team featuring Bob McAdoo was already scheduled in the bracket at the bottom - the 1960 Providence team led by great player Lenny Wilkens , who won their first game in the tournament against Marshall. The winner of that game will play a surprise Elite 8 team - LSU 1953.

The next pairing of 2024 teams against great player teams features these four games, with the winners playing a mini tournament and the winner filling the line in the great players bracket below to play Connecticut 1996 in that Elite 8.

We will start with one of our newest teams - Zach Edey and Purdue, against our second oldest team NYU from 1948. Only Wyoming has an older team in our game. We did not have stats to feature the 1945 team which somehow was national runner-up with a 14-7 mark, but they still had Dolph Schayes in 1948 when they went 22-4 so we used that team.  

The second pairing is below, and the winner will now face the Michigan 1993 team.

With the adjustment of the games above to fill the lines below, we will continue with that Elite 8 once the 17 teams above played their games.