2024-25 Conference Previews: ACC
The "advanced stats nerd" vs. "that boy nice" conference
Hello! As laid out in the season preview for this newsletter, we’re changing up preview season a little. Previews will be released in alphabetical order, but somewhat differently than usual: one P5 a day, one two-bid(ish) conference a day, and one grab bag of one-bid leagues a day. One of each will be free for all to read. This one is a paid piece, and there’s a link to sign up below.
You can find all of these in the 2024-25 previews section of this website. On with the show.
THE Atlantic Coast Conference
Tier 1
Duke
North Carolina
Tier 2
Wake Forest
Miami FL
Clemson
Louisville
Tier 3
Pittsburgh
Notre Dame
NC State
SMU
Virginia
Tier 4
Virginia Tech
Georgia Tech
Syracuse
Stanford
California
Tier 5
Florida State
Boston College
Let’s go ahead and list out the run of play here.
The ACC begins the year as a consensus fifth of the Power Five conferences by pretty much any metric you choose. This causes ACC fans to liquify their pants.
Duke (November 22) and North Carolina (November 8) lose early-season games that cause ACC Haterz to laugh and point, saying that even the top-end programs can’t beat the other conferences.
Sometime in January, a national journalist of some repute tweets that the ACC should only have two NCAA Tournament teams: Duke and North Carolina.
A rage of tweets by ACC-biased journalists in response criticize said media member, or members, for their anti-East Coast bias. They must think the Big 12 is actually good, so the ACC fans break down how many Q4 opponents are on Big 12 non-conference schedules.
The ACC conference slate plays itself out, and a conference with two great teams and a lot of question marks once again realizes that someone is legally required to finish third and win a lot of basketball games that don’t involve Duke or UNC. This team will rank 29th in KenPom and will go 14-6 in conference play. It will receive no lower than a 5 seed.
Two additional teams lock themselves into the field by - you guessed it! - someone having to win basketball games. Neither will be in the top 40 of KenPom, but both will be 7 or 8 seeds.
Somehow, a sixth team will sneak in via the First Four despite having 12 losses. This will be viewed as a crime, as it means a more interesting team with 26 or 27 wins gets left out.
This will be the most annoying, obnoxious league in terms of Twitter discussion, both pro- and anti-.
They will represent 25% of the Elite Eight at minimum.
Every single year. Every one. I genuinely despise this conference. And yet: it regrettably Means More. Gotta hand it to them in the same way one would hand it to a rich son that continues to fail upwards. You’ve definitely done a thing that did not make my life better. And you have 18 teams now on both coasts.
If you’re excited for another year of this, you either root for one of these 18 schools - EIGHTEEN - or you’re a sick man with sick thoughts. I am neither, but will try to keep my hate in check and my lunch in my stomach.
There are two legitimate national title contenders on opening night here, so they get their own tier. Tier 1 in these Power Five leagues is simple: you really should win one title or the other (regular season/conference tournament), and you are one of the 10 or so best teams in the nation. Contender status: unlocked.
No team, sans UConn, will generate more headlines this year than Duke. This is not the same as “will be the best team in America.” I do not have them #1, but having them in one’s top three is probably wise.
By almost any metric you look at, this is one of the five most talented rosters in America. They have one of the most highly-rated recruits in modern history. Per at least one of the major services, eight - EIGHT - five-star recruits are on this roster. Two starters from an Elite Eight team return. The arguable best player from Syracuse is here. So is a 47% 3PT shooter from Purdue. Duke added a 14 PPG scorer from the AAC who shot 60% 2PT/39% 3PT and it’s functionally an afterthought. The players who played in college last year shot 59% from two and 39% from three.
Attempting to find holes in the roster is difficult. There’s a couple areas that are plausibly exploitable that we’ll get to, but on its face I struggle to think of any roster in America with a higher overall ceiling. The roster is not of serious concern. The ability of Jon Scheyer to get the most out of a roster is still in question. Years one and two of Scheyer have resulted in a lot of discourse that I’m still uncertain where I fall on. Two things I do know are that ‘22-23 fell below expectations (KP: 15th to 18th, Torvik: 5th to 15th) and ‘23-24 more or less met them (KP: 9th to 7th, Torvik: 7th to 8th).
Scheyer has been handed the keys to a Ferrari, with two teams that possessed top-five talent at worst, and…has not yet finished top five. In both seasons, his teams have experienced serious extended lulls in which they’ve posted ugly losses (‘22-23: 81-70 to Wake Forest, 84-60 to NCSU; ‘23-24: 72-68 to GA Tech, 80-76 at home to Pitt). Both years, they’ve fallen at least 10 spots from their preseason ranking at one point. And, both years, they’ve put together monster Februarys to recover and build a quality Tournament resume.
This is a pretty huge year for Duke, then: a hyper-talented roster, the best Scheyer has had to date, but with legitimate questions about if they can drive it to its full potential or if they’ll leave the restrictor plate on. Any discussion of this roster starts with Cooper Flagg, who coaches pegged to be the best player in the entire sport and most have as, at worst, a top-10 player in America. These are lofty expectations, but it’s not impossible. These are the ten best freshman seasons by Torvik’s PRPG! since 2008:
If you prefer the two-way impact of BPM more, it’s still a salty list.
Consider that Flagg is the highest-rated recruit to ever pick Duke, which is a serious accomplishment. At bare minimum, Flagg is the most hyped college recruit I can personally remember since…Cade Cunningham? Ben Simmons? Anthony Davis? Kevin freaking Durant? Maybe, maybe not. But I do find educational the following list of players with a perfect 100 Talent Rating at Torvik, which is reserved for the highest-rated recruit in each class. One can argue Flagg should be a 101, I guess, but I think this is an informational table-setter.
The average there - the AVERAGE - is a +4.3 PRPG!, +8.5 BPM, 17.1 PPG, and 8.6 RPG. Only one freshman last year got the first two (Reed Sheppard), and no sophomores got all four. If Flagg really is the elite piece everyone claims and even comes in at the 75th-percentile of that list, he’s at worst a second-team All-American. And if he does come in as a top-10 freshman of the last 15 years? Well, you’re looking at someone who’ll be right in line with Mark Sears for Player of the Year. These are unknowns, but they’re tantalizing unknowns.
Flagg overpowers the Duke conversation to the point that it’s kind of easy to forget they bring back two-thirds of their starting backcourt in Tyrese Proctor and Caleb Foster. You’ll recall Proctor as last year’s All-American hype guy who came in, underwhelmed pretty dramatically, and now sits as a post-hype candidate entering a year three he probably imagined he wouldn’t enter still in a college uniform. Foster is a role player who caught fire from deep last year (41% on 69 threes) and whose absence after a late February injury was notable by Duke’s eFG% dropping nearly 4% the rest of the season.
Proctor, however, is a more intriguing case. By most measures, he was an objectively superior player to his freshman self. It seems that a significant portion of the Proctor hype train was driven by a 12-game stretch to close Duke’s 2022-23 season:
Tyrese Proctor, first 24 games of freshman year: 102 ORtg on 20% USG, 43% eFG% (44% 2PT, 28% 3PT), 18% Assist%, 19% TO%, -0.2 OBPM, +1.1 DBPM
Tyrese Proctor, final 12 games of freshman year: 116 ORtg on 20% USG, 51% eFG% (44% 2PT, 40% 3PT), 24% Assist%, 16% TO%, +3.1 OBPM, +2.1 DBPM
Proctor’s 2023-24 was actually a bang-on impression of that 12-game stretch: 116 ORtg on 18% USG, 53% eFG% (52% 2PT, 35% 3PT), 22% Assist%, 14% TO%, +3 OBPM, +1.5 DBPM. The problem was that everyone thought the leap that happened from games 1-24 to 25-36 would happen again in season two. It didn’t, which has led to him being pretty undervalued nationally. Proctor also dealt with injuries throughout last season and missed five games, which factors in. And yet: after Proctor returned from injury for the final time in mid-February, it looks like he may have made that second leap.
Tyrese Proctor, first 17 games of sophomore year: 115 ORtg on 18% USG%, 54% eFG% (54% 2PT, 35% 3PT), 21% Assist%, 15% TO%, +2.9 OBPM, +1.5 DBPM
Tyrese Proctor, final 11 games of sophomore year: 130 ORtg on 18% USG%, 60% eFG% (63% 2PT, 39% 3PT), 24% Assist%, 11% TO%, +5.4 OBPM, +2.2 DBPM
Here’s what makes Duke so scary: everyone seems to be assuming that Proctor is that 29-game stretch from end of freshman → first half of sophomore year. That’s a very good basketball player, but likely not one that does much beyond an All-ACC Honorable Mention. That 11-game end-of-season stretch is enough to likely make you an All-ACC First Teamer. Will a continuation of what was happen a second time? If so: post-hype star.
As rumored, there are other players on this team. Maliq Brown comes over from Syracuse, where I thought he was the best two-way player on the team. Brown’s +3.6 DBPM was sixth-highest in the ACC last year despite playing on the 85th-ranked defense in the nation, which is impressive.
The frontcourt options here are all pretty unique. Brown is great in the P&R and at cutting to the rim. Freshman 5-star Khaman Maluach is more of a rim-runner type. (I will note here that I am personally skeptical on Maluach in college; over the last two years, his Synergy data suggests a player who has a serious fouling problem and a very, very in-progress jumper.) Flagg can and will likely take some minutes at the 4. Patrick Ngongba is a true back-to-the-basket big who is crazy physical, both in good and bad ways. I can see the reason for all three.
I cannot, however, see the reason to play any of those two together when you need to win critical basketball games. Brown has a very okay jumper he pulls out on occasion. I don’t like Maluach’s jumper yet. Ngongba is an extreme non-shooter. Two of those together at the sport’s highest level could be quite rough offensively. In that event, Duke has to pick one to play at the 5, Proctor at the 1, Flagg the 4, and two of Foster, Kon Knueppel (secretly the second-best freshman on the team with a flamethrower jumper), Mason Gillis (career 41% 3PT shooter on largely stationary attempts), or Sion James, the aforementioned Tulane transfer who can shoot it.
This Duke team has answers to basically every question. The 75th-percentile outcome of Flagg, the headlining star, is that of one of the 10 best players in America. No other freshman can say that with a straight face. Proctor is a third-year starting quasi-point that knows what Scheyer wants on both ends. Brown is a high-ceiling PF/C that gives a lot on both ends. There are guys happy to play their role, like Foster and Gillis. There are potential breakout guys to take the heat off of Flagg, like Knueppel or Proctor himself. It may be the best roster in basketball. The final question to be answered: can Scheyer be the guy to get the most out of it?
BEHIND THE WALL ($): Figuring out which ACC team will be a 7 seed that makes the Final Four