By Will Despart
The Sporting Tribune
The John R. Wooden Award will celebrate it’s 50th anniversary this season. Leading up to the award ceremony on April 10, 2026, The Sporting Tribune in partnership with the Wooden Award and the Los Angeles Athletic Club will highlight past winners of the Wooden Award and the Legends of Coaching Award.
College basketball has seen a handful of transcendent characters over the years, but you could make a serious case that no player in college basketball’s modern era was as popular and polarizing as 1991-92 Wooden Award winner Christian Laettner of the Duke Blue Devils.
Laettner was the consensus National Player of the Year that season as a senior, averaging a career-high 21.2 points per game while leading Duke to its second consecutive national championship. That 1992 NCAA Tournament run is best remembered for Laettner’s iconic turnaround game-winning jumper in the Elite 8 against Kentucky, simply known as “The Shot.”
However, perhaps the most significant achievement during Laettner’s run at Duke was the Blue Devils’ stunning upset of the undefeated UNLV Runnin’ Rebels in the 1991 Final Four en route to the program’s first national title. In what is widely considered one of the defining upsets in college basketball history, Duke avenged a 30-point loss to UNLV in the previous year’s title game.
You also can’t discuss Laettner’s storied college career without mentioning the sheer disdain many folks had for him both on and off the court during his time at Duke. A 2013 ESPN poll determined Laettner was the most hated player in college basketball history, with many seeing him as the sport’s privileged pretty boy.
Regardless of what folks felt about Laettner’s appearance and background, one undeniable fact is that he was among the premier college basketball players in history. Laettner is the all-time NCAA tournament leader in points, games played, and games won, and the foundation he and those early-1990s Duke teams laid at the university has elevated it to universal blue-blood status.
Laettner was also a member of the greatest basketball team ever assembled, winning a gold medal with the “Dream Team” at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona after he was selected as the team’s amateur representative over Shaquille O’Neal.
The Minnesota Timberwolves drafted Laettner with the No. 3 pick in the 1992 NBA Draft and he spent the first four seasons of his 13-year career with the organization before taking the journeyman route with stints in Atlanta, Detroit, Dallas, Washington and Miami.
Laettner’s best production came at the start of his NBA career, as he averaged a career-high 18.2 points per game during his rookie season and at least 16 points per game in each of his first four seasons. While Laettner never quite attained the stardom he did in college in the NBA, he was still a serviceable starter and was even named an All-Star in 1997.