ACC Basketball Preview

Some time back, I offered the right to pick a post topic to anyone who managed to name one of the Physics Nobel laureates for 2006. Tom Renbarger won, and picked his topic:

OK, with Midnight Madness on the horizon, I’ve decided to request a sort of season preview of two (trying to press my advantage since I got two names) of the following three conferences: A-10, plus one of the Big East or ACC. Or, if you get on a roll, all three. If you’re pressed for time, the A-10 would suffice, and maybe something about Maryland. 🙂

I’m going to do the ACC first, because I know a bit more about them than the A-10. OK, to be honest, I know basically nothing about the A-10, but I’ll try to come up with something sensible to say about them. Until then, some thoughts about the ACC below the fold:

I’m not fool enough to attempt to predict the full order of finish for the league, as I didn’t get to watch all that much basketball last winter, so I’m not even sure about the returning players for some of these teams, let alone the new recruits. Instead, I’ll break the league into three rough groups:

First up are Teams I’m Pretty Sure Will Be Good: the three teams that I expect to be at the top of the league, in some order.

First up is North Carolina, who return most of their key players from last year’s surprisingly good team, and also add a highly-regarded recruiting class. They look like a classic Roy Williams team: deep, fast, and anchored by a big doofy-looking white kid (in this case, Tyler Hansbrough, who all kidding aside is a great player).

The only real question about Carolina is whether the new guys will both pan out, and fit in. Adding top-flight talent to an already good team can be risky, as Tar Heel fans who remember 1994 (when Rasheed Wallace and Jerry Stackhouse joined the defending national champions, and wrecked the chemistry) could tell you. Roy Williams has a track record at Kansas of keeping fairly deep teams together, so I would look for the Heels to be really, really good.

Also in this category is Duke where J.J. Redick has finally left for the NBA (where I’m sure no fans will ever yell hurtful things at him from the stands). The also lose Shelden Williams, who I don’t think was all that in an absolute sense, but was still one of the best big guys in the ACC last year. Duke will be looking for Josh McRoberts to step up, and he played well toward the end of last year. And, as always, they’ll be adding a handful of top prospects.

The biggest question mark about Duke, to my mind, is Mike Krzyzewski. That may sound like a strange thing to say, but keep in mind that he spent a lot of the spring and summer dealing with USA Basketball stuff, coaching the team that finished third in the World Championships. He hasn’t had much of a break, relatively speaking, and you might wonder if he’ll start to burn out a bit. I wouldn’t count on it, but it’s something to watch.

The third and final team that I’m pretty sure will be good is Boston College. They lost their top scorer and their starting point guard from last year, but they had competent backups for both, and high-scoring knucklehead Jared Dudley is still there. They’re not bringing in a lot of new people, but they don’t really need to change much, and they should continue to be successful.

The second category is The Team I Actually Care About, namely Maryland. The Terps have sort of floundered for the last couple of years, and lost some talented players at the end of last season in Nik Caner-Medley and Chris McCray.

the conventional wisdom is that the key to their success or failure will be the play of freshman point guard Eric Hayes, who is supposed to be the next Steve Blake. This theory presumes that all of their woes from the past couple of seasons stemmed from head-case point guard John Gilchrist, either through his erratic personality or because of his early departure.

I’m not sold on that theory, in large part because I’m a big guy, and was brought up a post player. When I looked at the last couple of Maryland teams, the glaring weakness I saw wasn’t the guard play, it was the lack of a solid inside player. Gary Williams’s best teams have all had a guy inside who could pretty much carry the rebounding and post defense load by himself. They haven’t had a guy like that since Lonny Baxter left, and as a result, they’ve been horribly inconsistent.

I’m looking at the roster of leftover inside players, and I see the talented but erratic James Gist, the stick-figure thin Ekene Ibekwe, and the glacially slow Will Bowers, and I’m not feeling too hopeful. And I’m looking at the list of recruits for this year, and not seeing a whole lot of help there, either.

So, to be honest, I’m not expecting much from this year’s Maryland team. But then again, nobody thought Baxter would be worth a damn, either, and Joe Smith was an afterthought, so who knows?

And then, there’s the third category: Teams With Big Questions. Which is, basically, everyone else in the ACC.

You’ve got teams like Miami and Wake Forest, who weren’t all that good last year, and graduated most of their best players. What are they going to do this year? Good question.

There’s NC State, who appear to be in complete disarray, with their coach leaving for Arizona State, their top players either graduating or just leaving, and a long, drawn-out search for a new coach.

Florida State seems to have some good athletes, but they’re really small, so it’s not clear who’s playing the post for them. Virginia returns a couple of great guards, but last year, they were a couple of great guards plus a bunch of goons and stiffs, and it’s not clear whether they’ve improved that. Virginia Tech likewise has a bunch of good guards, but not much height.

Clemson has the opposite problem– they’ve got pretty good size, especially with their new recruits, but it’s not clear who’s going to score. And finally, there’s Georgia Tech, where they’re bringing in some good talent, but a lot will depend on how well these guys fit together. They were sort of flaky the last couple of years, and having a bunch of young guys getting significant minutes usually doesn’t help that.

If you put a gun to my head, and made me pick a team to win the league, I’d probably go with North Carolina. Roy Williams is a great coach, and he appears to be well stocked with talented players. I really like the way his teams play ball, and they look like they’ve got good players at every position.

But whenever a team looks this stacked going into the season, it makes me really nervous. Things have a way of getting weird around really loaded teams, and Roy Williams has had more than his share of great teams that just fell apart in the post-season, so I wouldn’t be all that confident putting them down for a national title at this point. Still, I expect they’ll be fun to watch, and this year’s Duke-UNC games ought to be fun to watch.