After Georgia Tech plays Northern Illinois on Thursday night, Yellow Jackets fans watching the game on ACC Network will get a special bonus. At 10 p.m., the network will air a 30-minute program on Tech’s 1990 Final Four team that focuses on Lethal Weapon 3 – the high-scoring trio of Kenny Anderson, Brian Oliver and Dennis Scott.
The documentary features interviews with all three Jackets greats, plus coach Bobby Cremins, assistant coaches Kevin Cantwell and Perry Clark, former Jackets stars Malcolm Mackey and Bruce Dalrymple and others who were around the team during its run to Tech’s first appearance in the Final Four. It starts with Cremins’ building of the program through Mark Price, John Salley and Dalrymple and examines how that foundation led to the recruitment of Oliver, Scott and Anderson.
Augmented by video and photos from the season and the players’ high school careers, the program focuses less on specific games and more about the greatness of the trio, the bond that tied them and the team together and the magic of a season that captivated Atlanta in a way that is difficult to imagine more than 30 years later.
“To win an ACC championship and make the Final Four for the first time in Georgia Tech history, those are things coaches dream about,” Cremins says at the outset of the documentary. “When I look back at our 1990 season, we knew we had special players, but that alone won’t win a championship. It was our incredible chemistry and desire to be great that took us to new heights.”
Scott tells a story about the first practice of that season. He came off a screen and was not looking for the ball, unused to having a point guard who could find him, only to have Anderson’s pass hit him in the head.
“‘Yo, ‘D,’ yo, D! I see you!’” Scott says, quoting Anderson. Scott’s response: “My bad, Chibbs (Anderson’s nickname). It’ll never happen again.”
The electricity that Lethal Weapon 3 generated – all three players averaged more than 20 points, topped by Scott’s 27.7 points per game, an average that no ACC player has matched since – may never happen again either.
The program will re-air at 10:30 p.m., multiple times Friday and likely many more times during the course of the season.
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