The best transfers aren’t always the best players available on the portal. They’re the players who are the best fit for the programs they join.
It’s a concept Clemson’s Brad Brownell clearly understood when he brought Viktor Lakhin in from Cincinnati to fill the massive void left by the departure of first-team All-ACC selection PJ Hall.
The 6-foot-11 Russian was something of an afterthought in a big man transfer market dominated by the likes of Texas Tech’s JT Toppin, Indiana’s Oumar Ballo, Baylor’s Norchad Omier and Alabama’s Clifford Omoruyi. But Lakhin provided the Tigers with an inside-outside skill set similar to that of Hall, the leading scorer and second-leading rebounder for last season’s Elite Eight team.
And Lahkin has delivered even more than Brownell could have hoped.
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Not only is he picking up the slack statistically, averaging 11.0 points, 6.1 rebounds and 1.8 blocks while shooting 50 percent from the floor and 40 percent from beyond the three-point arc. He’s also become the emotional Glue Guy whose competitive personality has carried over to his teammates. Just as Hall’s did before him.
“He’s a very valuable player,” Brownell said of Lakhin last week. “He’s a very emotional guy. He cares, wants to win and do well. In games, he’s literally making suggestions to me, probably more frequently than I like. But we encourage that with our players. He’s thinking the game. He’s trying to think the next play. Every once in a while I’ve got to tell him ‘Please let me coach.’ Relax. But that’s how he gets going.”
Lakhin was a pivotal figure in a huge season-defining sequence last week that saw the Tigers pull off the rare double of beating Duke and North Carolina in consecutive games.
Motivated by a triple-overtime loss to Georgia Tech in which he fouled out after only 16 minutes, Lakhin outdueled Blue Devils star Cooper Flagg by going for 22 points (on 9 of 12 shooting), 4 rebounds, 2 assists and 3 blocks in the court-storming 77-71 victory that catapulted Clemson back into the national rankings. Two nights later, he hit for 22 again—this time by making four three-pointers—while blocking 5 shots to spark an 85-65 dismantling of the Tar Heels.
Together with fellow transfer Jaeden Zackery (who came from Boston College), along with holdovers Chase Hunter and Ian Scheifflein, Lakhin has the Tigers (22-5, 13-2 ACC) trending in the right direction at the right time of year. “I think I’m playing really good basketball, probably the best basketball of my whole college career,” Lakhin said after the Duke game. “Part of what makes it so good is we’re winning. So we’re winning and it feels just twice better.”
NC State needs another miracle. This time just to make the ACC Tournament
The Wolfpack’s Kevin Keatts sounded remarkably optimistic for a coach whose team had just lost its ninth straight game, a 91-66 blowout at the hands of Louisville, last Wednesday.
Keatts’ team has work to do in order to escape ending the regular season in the bottom three of the ACC and therefore missing out on next month’s conference tournament in Charlotte. If Keatts learned anything from the lightning the Wolfpack caught in a bottle last March, a month-long joyride that gave new meaning to Jimmy V’s mantra of “don’t give up, don’t ever give up,” it’s that nothing is impossible.
Until it actually is.
“If you get playing basketball at the right time, anything can happen,” Keatts said. “We’ve just got to start the right time now. It’s a little bit different.”
In some respects, the task facing Keatts and his team isn’t as daunting as the one they faced a year ago. It took five wins in as many days to win the 2024 ACC Tournament and earn the opportunity to go on an even more improbable four-game run to the Final Four. This year’s team will at least have some time between games to go back to the practice floor and work on correcting some of the mistakes that have been haunting them since the start of the new year. But even that might not help.
Because at 3-11 in the conference (10-15 overall), State no longer controls its fate. It could conceivably win out and still not avoid the indignity of being one of the three teams left uninvited to the ACC’s annual postseason party. Even after Saturday’s badly needed win against Boston College, the Wolfpack still trails 15th-place Notre Dame by two games with six left to play.
Part of State’s problem is the makeup of its roster. While it features a solid set of complementary parts, there’s no go-to guy who can take over when things start going sideways the way DJ Horne and DJ Burns did for last year’s team. That shortcoming has been especially damaging in close games. Six of the losses in the recent nine-game skid were by six points or fewer. Four came down to the final possession.
If there’s any solace to the Pack’s current predicament, it’s that the schedule at least allows the possibility for a late run. Only two of the six teams remaining on the schedule have a winning record in the ACC. Miami is 2-12 in league play; Syracuse is 5-10, Pitt is 6-8 and Georgia Tech is 7-8.
“Anything can happen,” Keatts said, “if we can push the right buttons.”
Around the Rim
• Stanford point guard Jaylen Blakes is by far the most improved player in the ACC this season. His 320 points and 113 assists in 23 games are nearly twice as many as the 183 points and 63 assists he recorded in his three previous seasons at Duke combined. It’s a success story he couldn’t wait to show off in his return to Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday. But things didn’t go as well for him as they did in his first trip back east, when he hit the game-winning basket to beat Duke’s rival North Carolina. Blakes went just 1-for-10 from the floor with 3 turnovers in his team’s 106-70 loss to the second-ranked Blue Devils. “Homecomings go one of two ways,” Stanford coach Kyle Smith said afterward. “He wanted it badly. They jumped him early and did some things. There’s added pressure. But he’ll bounce back. He’s been great for him.” Blakes’ former coach Jon Scheyer said he was happy that Duke’s fans gave their former favorite a warm welcome home. “Jaylen is Duke family,” he said.
• Chucky Hepburn has played a major role in Louisville’s resurgence from the dregs of college basketball to an NCAA Tournament team flirting with the top-25. He’s averaging a career-high 15 points per game, he ranks second in the ACC in assists at 6.2 per game and his 2.4 steals lead the league. And yet, even with that production, the Wisconsin transfer still wasn’t among the 10 players selected as finalists for the Bob Cousy Award, presented by the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame to the nation’s top point guard. It’s a snub that has Cardinals coach Pat Kelsey seeing red. “They got it wrong. I promise you that,” he said after Hepburn scored 15 points and handed out 6 assists in last Wednesday’s rout of NC State, adding “I wouldn’t trade Chucky for any point guard in the country. … Many times those things are out of your control. All you can do about it is how you play and how you lead your team and continue to win. He’s a stud on both ends of the floor. I knew he was going to be good, but I didn’t know he would be this good. He’s special.”
• Which is more impactful to a bubble team’s postseason resume: A Quad 1 win on the road or an ugly Quad 3 loss at home three days earlier? Or do they simply cancel each other out? We won’t know until Selection Sunday, but Wake Forest is hoping that Saturday’s impressive 77-66 win at SMU will help ease the negative impact of what coach Steve Forbes called “probably the worst loss in my tenure here.” It was a 72-70 setback to Florida State in which Forbes’ Deacons blew a 16-point lead in the final eight-and-a-half minutes. To Wake’s credit, it was able to bounce back and win a game it absolutely had to win to stay in contention for an NCAA bid. And it did so without second-leading scorer Cam Hildreth, who missed the game with a foot injury. The win helped improve the Deacons’ NET ranking to No. 60, six spots better than where they started the week.
• Notre Dame is fighting to stay above the cut line that will eliminate the bottom three teams from next month’s ACC Tournament. If the Irish succeed and get to Charlotte, they’ll have Markus Burton to thank for it. Last season’s ACC Rookie of the Year has been on a tear since returning from a knee injury that sidelined him for the entire month of December. He has scored 20 or more points in nine of his 11 games since returning against North Carolina on Jan. 4. That includes a season-high 32 last Wednesday in a double-overtime win against Boston College that improved Notre Dame to 11-13 overall (5-8 ACC). Burton’s heater has catapulted him past Stanford’s Maxime Raynaud into the conference scoring lead at 21.3 points per game. “He’s fun to coach, because he has great energy and he gives off great energy to his teammates,” Notre Dame coach Micah Shrewsberry said after a win against Miami on Feb. 1. “He’s learning how people are guarding him, what the situation is, what it calls for and you can see him start to read the game, start to read defenses, set himself up, setting his teammates up, and he’s doing it all efficiently right now.”
