Where did all the hype go? Why ACC basketball this season has the feel of a mid-major
Nothing prompts an eye roll quicker on the ACC men’s basketball coaches weekly press conference than questions pertaining to the league being “down” this season.
Truthfully, the ACC hasn’t felt like the ACC since the 2018-19 season.
North Carolina, Duke and Virginia earned No. 1 seeds in the 2019 NCAA tournament. The Cavaliers joined the 2015 Blue Devils and 2017 Tar Heels becoming the third ACC team in five years to win the NCAA national championship. A total of 10 players from five of the league’s schools were taken in the NBA draft’s first round starting with Duke’s Zion Williamson as the No. 1 overall pick.
But since then? There hasn’t been much to tout.
Duke was not just the lone ACC team ranked in the latest Associated Press Top 25, but in the week of the Jan. 3 poll, it was the only league team that received votes. It marked the first time in more than 40 years only one ACC team received votes in the poll — and it was just an eight-team league back then.
Miami and Notre Dame each received votes in the latest poll released on Monday. But Duke remains the league’s only ranked team at No. 9.
“People are going to pick on the ACC because we’ve been up there so long at the top of the world,” former UNC coach Roy Williams told The News & Observer. “With Duke being the only team in the top 20 or top 25, that’s what people are looking at. But I still believe at the end of the year, there’s going to be two or three or four ACC teams that have a chance to go a long way in the tournament.”
That wasn’t the case with the league in last season’s NCAA tournament. Five of the seven ACC teams that received bids got bounced in the first round. Both Florida State and Syracuse lost in the Sweet 16, leaving the ACC’s combined conference tournament record at 4-7.
It was the first time since 2015 the league didn’t reach at least 10 tournament wins collectively. (The Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, SEC and Pac-12 combined have just eight such years over the same span.)
The early results from non-conference play this season haven’t instilled much confidence that things will be different. The ACC as a whole is 4-16 against ranked teams. It has a losing record against those other five major conferences except the Pac-12, where it went 2-2.
Forward Garrison Brooks started for North Carolina the better part of the last four seasons. He transferred to Mississippi State, where his father is an assistant coach and he originally committed in high school, to play his final year.
His first two years, Carolina was a No. 2 and No. 1 seed in the tournament, respectively. But as a junior, Carolina suffered the first losing record in Williams’ career the 2019-20 season. And last season Brooks was on the first Williams-coached team to lose in the first round.
Brooks said the SEC is now what the ACC was in 2018-19.
“I’d compare the SEC to that right now,” Brooks told the N&O. “Of course, I don’t think we’ll have three No. 1 seeds, but it’s just the mere fact of you got some really good teams and the teams in the middle are like tournament teams. It’s never a break. It’s never like you can catch a breath against, say, for instance, from the ACC, a Boston College type.”
ESPN.com’s Joe Lunardi predicts five ACC teams will receive bids in his latest Bracketology update. Lunardi’s projection includes Duke as a No. 2 seed, Wake Forest as a No. 8 seed and Carolina in the group of last four in that will play in the tournament’s ‘First Four’ games in Dayton.
Lack of first-round talent?
ESPN basketball analyst Jay Bilas — as well as an NBA scout who is a former Division I coach and spoke to the N&O under the condition of anonymity — pointed to the same number when discussing why the league isn’t winning at the level to which it is accustomed.
Zero.
As in, the ACC has zero bona fide NBA first-round draft picks outside of Duke. The Blue Devils figure to have freshmen Paolo Banchero, Trevor Keels and A.J. Griffin all picked in the draft’s first round.
That decline in elite talent has led to diminished results compared with how the ACC has typically performed.
“It’s undeniable that the talent level is down,” said Bilas, who starred at Duke from 1982-86. “We can’t promote they have three teams as No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament, which we had a few years ago, and then turn around and say, ‘Oh, but what you’re seeing now doesn’t exist.’ ”
Consider the NBA draft as a barometer of the league’s talent. The last two ACC Player of the Year picks — Duke’s Tre Jones in 2020 and Georgia Tech’s Moses Wright in 2021 — were not selected in the first round of the draft. The last time that happened in consecutive years was when N.C. State’s Julius Hodge (2004) and Duke’s J.J. Redick (2005) both returned to school the season after winning the honor.
Aside from that, the only time the league’s Player of the Year wasn’t taken in the first round since the 2000-01 season was in 2013 when Virginia Tech’s Erick Green, who shared the award with Miami’s Shane Larkin, was taken in the second round. (Larkin was a first-rounder.)
That’s why the NBA scout said it’s more of a trend than a one-year hiccup.
“This ain’t a blip on the radar. No, this is the way it is now,” the scout said. “Let me let me tell you why, because with this NIL (name, image, likeness) going on, from what I’m gathering, a lot of the ACC schools, they really aren’t jumping in on it the way other schools are.”
N.C. State coach Kevin Keatts doesn’t view the draft as a measuring stick of talent. He said all the draft does is show the league doesn’t have the younger talent that it normally has.
“A lot of times, the NBA, they draft on potential opposed to who’s really good,” Keatts said. “We’ve got some older guys in the league that are really good players that deserve to be pro prospects that may not get the chance to play right away in the NBA or get drafted.”
Impact of the transfer portal
Keatts also pointed out that the league’s schools have had mixed results with the transfer portal. It helped Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes turn the program around in just his second season thanks to the addition of Oklahoma transfer Alondes Williams, who is leading the league in scoring and assists.
But transfers decimated Virginia having Justin McKoy (UNC), Casey Morsell (N.C. State) and Jabri Adbur-Rahim (Georgia) leave after last season. Much of the Cavaliers success has been predicated on developing players who shine as upperclassmen.
A wealth of talent has utilized the transfer portal and left the league. UNC coach Hubert Davis made a pitch to keep 7-foot center Walker Kessler during his introductory press conference. Kessler still left for a starting role at Auburn, which is currently the No. 1 team in the AP Top 25. Kessler is thriving with the Tigers, where he is second in the nation and leads the SEC with 4 blocked shots per game.
“The league’s in a transition,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said. “But all of college basketball is in a transition with the way the portal’s influencing the game and things of that nature.”
Coaching turnover
It’s not just the players that the ACC is adjusting to losing.
The retirement of UNC’s Roy Williams, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski in his final year and three more septuagenarians in Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, Miami’s Jim Larrañaga and Hamilton who figure to be nearing retirement means the league is in a leadership transition, too.
Both the SEC and Big 12 conferences currently have more head coaches who have made Final Four appearances (six in each league) than the ACC (four).
Larrañaga said that young players and transfers coming into the league had to adjust to the league and “sometimes that can take a while.” It did for the Hurricanes, which lost to UCF and Dayton in non-conference play, but now sit atop the ACC standings.
That’s why Krzyzewski is reserving judgment on the league in his last season. He said a team like Miami has improved from where it started the season.
“They weren’t who they are now at that point, and that’s the problem a little bit in not giving more of an eye test when they’re choosing teams for the tournament,” Krzyzewski said. “…So I think our league is good but we’ll see how it all turns out.”
This story was originally published February 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Where did all the hype go? Why ACC basketball this season has the feel of a mid-major."