In his four seasons at North Carolina, Tyler Hansbrough was a three-time first-team All-American, national player of the year in 2008 and won a national title in 2009. (Getty)

The most accomplished college basketball player of his generation has a theory for why his NBA career fizzled out more quickly than he expected.

Tyler Hansbrough considers himself a casualty of the NBA’s recent pace-and-space revolution, a throwback power forward stranded in an era when the league prefers mobile, athletic big men capable of shooting threes and defending away from the basket.

“I do think if the league isn’t as 3-point-driven and small-ball-driven, I’d probably still be playing right now,” the 33-year-old Hansbrough said. “I still think I can play very competitive basketball, but the NBA has changed in a way that doesn’t fit my game.”

When Hansbrough entered the NBA in 2009, Mike D’Antoni’s seven-seconds-or-less offense was still considered a curiosity, not a forerunner to a revolution. The NBA’s fastest-paced team during the 2008-09 season would be its slowest this season. The team that led the league in 3-pointers per game attempted that same year would rank 27th today.

By the time Golden State won the first of its three titles in 2015 with 6-foot-7 Draymond Green spending time at center, NBA coaches were viewed as dinosaurs if they didn’t go small and emphasize floor spacing and defensive versatility. There was no longer room in the league for a brutish big man like the 6-foot-9, 250-pound Hansbrough who couldn’t protect the rim well enough to play center yet lacked the perimeter skill or lateral quickness to be a modern-day power forward.

Unable to land a contract offer from an NBA team for the 2016-17 season, Hansbrough sat out for four months, then averaged 17.6 points and 12.2 rebounds in 13 games with the G-League’s Fort Wayne Mad Ants. That didn’t garner Hansbrough any NBA nibbles either, so the former North Carolina star has spent the past two seasons playing in China.

“I kind of saw it coming,” Hansbrough said. “Teams started going small and then when Golden State went small and started winning, it seemed like the whole league went in that direction. I tried to improve my 3-point shooting and shoot more, but that’s not really my game. I’ve always been a physical player. I can grow and get better in those things, but my bread and butter is always going to be rebounding and work around the basket.”

That Hansbrough didn’t make a greater impact in the NBA should have no impact on the legacy he built at North Carolina. Few players in the history of the storied Tar Heels program have achieved more in Carolina blue than Hansbrough.

Pressed into a starting role as a freshman after Marvin Williams and Sean May both entered the NBA draft, Hansbrough took advantage by averaging 18.9 points and 7.8 rebounds and earning second-team All-American honors. Hansbrough matched or improved on those numbers each of the next three seasons, winning national player of the year in 2008 and first-team All-American honors as a sophomore, junior and senior.

When eventual national champ Kansas throttled North Carolina in the 2008 national semifinals, Hansbrough chose to return to Chapel Hill for his senior season and made it his mission to capture a championship. A Tar Heels team led by Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, Danny Green and Wayne Ellington laid waste to the rest of the 2009 NCAA tournament field, winning all six games it played by double figures en route to Roy Williams’ second national title.

“There was a lot of pressure on us from the outside that year, but we also put a lot of pressure on ourselves,” Hansbrough said. “We felt we were the most talented team by far and we’d been to a Final Four. In our eyes, if we didn’t win the championship, the season would have been a failure to be honest.”

Capturing a national title may have been Hansbrough’s proudest achievement at North Carolina, but it’s not the one he’s asked about most often.

There’s his powerful two-handed dunk on UNC Asheville’s 7-foot-7 center Kenny George.

“I was a little frustrated, so I took it right at him,” Hansbrough said. “The crowd loved it.”

There’s his 4-0 career record at Duke.

“The celebrations when we’d come back to campus,” Hansbrough said, “that’s where we had the real fun.”

And there’s the flagrant foul delivered by Duke’s Gerald Henderson that broke Hansbrough’s nose but not his spirit.

“I would say we’re friends now,” Hansbrough said. “We don’t talk all the time, but we’re cool.”

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