When NC State introduced Justin Gainey as its new men's basketball head coach in the spring of 2026, the club level at the Lenovo Center filled with Wolfpack legends — Dereck Whittenburg among them.
The 1983 championship team came up quickly. In laying out the standard for a new era, Gainey pointed to the group that clawed from a play-in game all the way to a national title as the template for what NC State basketball can be.
Few people embody that story more directly than Whittenburg, the senior captain whose desperation heave in Albuquerque became Lorenzo Charles' championship dunk — a moment he still insists, with a grin, was a pass all along.
More than forty years later, his presence in the room said what the words did: at NC State, 1983 isn't just history. It's the measuring stick.