Better Know a Conference: ACC (Part I)

Can Duke transcend? Are Clemson and Pitt underrated? And what on Earth will happen at Virginia?

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Better Know a Conference is Buzzer’s league-by-league preview of the 2024-25 season, featuring Bubble Watch-length narrative looks at every team in every major league — and other miscellany and mid-majors along the way — in rough order of expected finish.

To read the full series (and start posting on the best college hoops comment section on the Internet!) consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Today: The ACC, Part I.

In Part II — coming shortly because (checks watch) the season is almost here — we will discuss the state of the ACC, the state of the discourse about the ACC, the league’s war against advanced metrics, the importance of the coming nonconference season, and why the middle and bottom half of the ACC will be so crucial in its constant perceptual struggle this season. But that’s Part II! For now, let’s jump in, beginning with the most obviously talented team in college basketball:

Duke

At the risk of immediately undermining the entire premise of this preview, let's just be real: What else can we say about this roster that hasn't already been said? It's ... really, really, really good. Even in an era defined by older, more stolid, more transfer-driven rosters — coaches have always loved reliable college veterans even (and sometimes especially!) if they come with limited professional upside, and now they can hunt those types in the portal every spring — Duke's sheer collection of young-ish NBA talent feels undeniable.

Is Cooper Flagg already the best player in the country? He looked like close the summer, when he held his own training with the Olympic gold-winning US Men's National Team, a performance fitting with everything you've already heard about the top prospect in the 2024 class (and the top prospect in US for pretty much all of his four high school and AAU seasons). But Flagg is merely the gem of the nation's top recruiting class. Super-long center Khaman Maluach is a fellow top-five player nationally, if rawer, but could look a lot like Derrick Lively by the time the Blue Devils get into league play. Six-foot-six wing Isaiah Evans ranks No. 13 in the country overall, and in almost any other rotation would be a lock to start and play big minutes right away; ditto for Kon Knueppel, a Wisconsin-born sharpshooter so good his recruiting escape velocity left both his home-state Badgers and Tony Bennett's Virginia back on Earth.

(A kid named "Kon Knueppel" will not be playing pack-line defense and/or swing offense this winter. We're losing recipes.)

That neither of the latter two prospects (not to Paul IV Catholic duo Patrick Ngongba II and Darren Harris, both of whom are top-40 players in this class!) are guaranteed starter minutes should tell you how good the rest of this roster is. Tyrese Proctor and Caleb Foster are both back, and there's your starting backcourt. Transfer Maliq Brown put up a 131.2 offensive rating and finished 70.8 percent of his 2-point attempts at Syracuse last season, highest in the ACC. Mason Gillis was an all-time outside-in 3-and-D glue guy at Purdue, and arrieves having shot 58-of-124 (!!) from 3 last season.

Gillis, especially, feels like a winning personnel play from Scheyer and his staff. There's nothing wrong with being young if being young means stocking your team with lottery picks, but Scheyer would have noticed that the past two national champions — not to mention the dominant team Gillis played on a season ago — combined talent with veteran cohesion and transfers peppered in. Those rosters were balanced and deep. Scheyer's first two teams have been extremely gifted, but they haven't had an old head like Gillis.

It helps, of course, that he can really play, and blend in to multiple different types of lineups. By default, Duke's guards make it big, and any lineup with Maluach and Brown on the floor will feel super-imposing on the defensive end. But Duke can also go small and switchable with Gillis around; Knueppel or Evans can play at the two; Flagg can play just about anywhere; Brown can play the five. There are about eight different hypothetical configurations that sound like the best five-man squad in the country.

Which, come to think of it, doubles as the only real concern. Can Scheyer and his staff figure another new team out? The 37-year-old coach's first season offered lots of questions about tactical acumen and the ability to build a free-flowing offense from talented parts. Things felt sterile and stilted, like Scheyer was picking plays out of a notebook, following best practices, rather than fostering an environment in which his players could create. Duke was better last season, more fluid, with more shooting and better spacing. (Thanks, Jared McCain. Don't let Kyle Lowry stop you vlogging, bro!) Its defense also improved as the season went on; its lineups got better and more optimized.

But this is the real challenge: Can Duke go beyond simple optimization? Anyone can space the floor and run effective sets with this much talent. Any mid high school coach could tell Jared McCain to get downhill on a ballscreen from Kyle Filipowski. The goal this season should be far loftier, not just effective basketball and 25 wins but something actually special, more memorable, more fun. Help Flagg be the most productive player in the country, sure, but also make him someone we absolutely have to watch every single night. Give him a team that runs and flows around him. Give him space to express himself. Let him play.

Duke fans won't care about any of this, obviously. They'll be happy as long as the Blue Devils win, and get a No. 1 or No. 2 seed, and look primed for a deep run come March. But in Scheyer's third season, with a team this talented, and with as much as we'll be watching them on TV for the next five months, the rest of us can hope for a little something more.

North Carolina