With eight minutes left in the first half on Sunday, Louisville led Duke, 30-16. The Cardinals continued to hold the lead, and at 55-50 with ten-and-a-half minutes to play, it looked like they were poised to pull off a season-defining upset.
Alas, things fell apart from there, as Duke went on an 18-2 spurt and coasted home to a 76-65 win. Yes, the Blue Devils are more talented than Louisville — they’re more talented than just about everyone — but for Louisville the loss revealed a deeper problem. Or rather, a depth problem.
Optimism was already running high at Louisville before new coach Pat Kelsey and his roster full of talented transfers arrived in the Bahamas and ran Indiana out of the ballroom in a dominating 89-61 Battle 4 Atlantis beatdown.
But just as it appeared that the new-look Cardinals were ready to fashion a quick rise from the depths of the Kenny Payne era, their outlook moving forward this season became clouded by a series of injuries.
“We’re not the same team we were two-and-a-half or three weeks ago when we were playing 11 guys,” Kelsey said after the game. “Obviously we were downhill, getting the ball inbounds, tilting the floor, attacking the basket. We’ve definitely made some adjustments because of how short our rotation is right now.”
The most damaging loss was to 6-foot-10 senior Kasean Pryor, who suffered a season-ending ACL tear in the opening minutes of the Battle 4 Atlantis championship game against Oklahoma. The USF transfer wasn’t just the team’s third-leading scorer at 12 points per game, he was also Louisville’s best rebounder at 6.1 per game, third in assists with 15 and an aggressive defender whose energy rubbed off on his teammates.
With fellow big man Abacou Traore already out indefinitely with a broken left arm, the Cardinals suddenly find themselves thin in the frontcourt. That’s likely to continue being a problem moving forward, especially against teams like Duke that have a big front line.
BYU transfer Noah Waterman and College of Charleston transfer James Scott will be asked to do most of the heavy lifting inside. But the drop-off in talent and lack of depth has already begun to show, with losses to both Oklahoma and Ole Miss on Tuesday in the ACC/SEC Challenge.
“My message to the players after the (Ole Miss) game was that the one thing they don’t have to worry about is being good,” Kelsey said. “We’re going to be a good team. I believe that deep down in my soul with every fiber of my being. We have a long way to go.”
A Pair of Bright Spots in an Otherwise Dark Challenge
The ACC was already fighting a losing battle in the war of perception before last week’s ACC/SEC Challenge.
And things only got worse once the games were played.
The conference suffered a major blow, both to its reputation and chances and in the NET rankings, by losing 14 of its 16 head-to-head matchups against the SEC in the annual competition between the leagues.
Of the losses, five were by 20 points or more, including a 33-point embarrassment of then-No. 18 Pittsburgh by Mississippi State.
Believe it or not, though, there is at least one silver lining to come out of the two-day series. Thanks to Duke’s win against No. 2 Auburn and Clemson taking down No. 10 Kentucky, the ACC was able to claim victories in games involving the two highest-rated teams in the field.
In doing so, it showed that as bad as things are right now, the conference still has two legitimate Final Four contenders.
The performances by both the young Blue Devils and veteran Tigers were equally promising moving forward into the new year.
But in vastly different ways.
After late-game disappointments in losses to Kentucky and Kansas, Duke is starting to show glimpses that both its young players and still-young coach are beginning to come into their own.
Men’s College Basketball Top 25 Rankings
Seth Davis’ rankings for Week 11. Purdue moves up, five new teams move in.Top-rated freshman Cooper Flagg has been everything he was hyped to be over the first month of his college career. But against the Tigers, the 17-year-old phenom showed a heightened sense of patience and maturity while recording 22 points, 11 rebounds, 4 assists and no turnovers.
While fellow rookies Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach have been in the starting lineup since day one, their classmate Isaiah Evans came off the bench to hit six three-pointers in the first half — a perimeter threat that should help provide better spacing for everyone else on the court.
As for coach Jon Scheyer, his decision to move graduate transfer Sion James into the starting lineup in place of sophomore Caleb Foster has added an element of toughness and stability to a unit that is long on talent but short on experience.
“I think we’ve learned from some of these other games we’ve been in,” Scheyer said, adding that even in the close losses, he knew “we have something with this group… They have special character. Special toughness.”
Compared to Duke’s freshman-dominated lineup, Brad Brownell’s Clemson Tigers are a bunch of Baby Boomers.
Their roster is fully stocked with juniors, seniors and a graduate point guard, Chase Hunter, who is in his sixth season in the program. While they miss the leadership, scoring and rebounding of departed big man PJ Hall, Cincinnati transfer Viktor Lakin has done a good job filling in some of the gaps while senior forward Ian Schieffein has made the successful transition from energy glue guy to full-fledged star.
Clemson is well on the way to proving that last season’s Elite Eight run was anything but a flash in the pan “It just shows we can still do it,” Hunter said after the Kentucky game. “I think maybe people kind of downed us this year, we didn’t have this or that. But we’re a team that fights. We can compete with anybody.”
Around the rim
- Commissioner Jim Phillips likes to crow about the ACC’s record in March. And it’s a good one, with more wins than any other conference last season to go along with three of the final eight teams playing in regional finals. Not to mention the fact that four conference programs (including Louisville) have won a national title since the SEC’s last champion, Kentucky in 2012. But in order to do well in the NCAA Tournament, you first have to get into the NCAA Tournament. And while there’s still plenty of time and room for growth, there aren’t many ACC teams that pass the eye test right now.
What’s worse, the initial NET rankings that were released last week paint an even more ominous picture moving forward into conference play. Duke is still in good shape at No. 4. So is Pittsburgh at No. 5 and Clemson at No. 18 while North Carolina (No. 26) and Louisville (No. 30) are also in the top 30. But after that, the dropoff is steep enough to base-jump from without much risk of injury. Nine teams, exactly half the league’s current membership, are ranked 89th or lower, with Virginia Tech bringing up the rear, buried at No. 233 behind the likes of Campbell, Tennessee Tech and Southeast Missouri State.
- N.C. State’s difficulties from beyond the three-point line finally caught up with them at the Rady’s Children’s Invitational in San Diego last weekend. The Wolfpack were just 4 of 17 from distance in an opening-round loss to Purdue, then went 9 of 23 in a consolation game loss to BYU. Coach Kevin Keatts is hoping that the return of junior guard Mike James will help improve his team’s perimeter shooting. But it doesn’t appear that’s going to happen anytime soon. Asked about James, who averaged 12.6 points and shot 34 percent from beyond the arc for Louisville last season, Keatts said there’s still no timetable for his NC State debut. “I want to temper expectations because I have no idea when he’s going to be out there,” Keatts said on his weekly radio show.
- North Carolina is already dealing with a number of issues, including some sporadic perimeter shooting and the lack of a true inside presence. But now coach Hubert Davis has another pressing concern as his Tar Heels prepare for a pair of important non-conference tests against Florida in Charlotte and UCLA at Madison Square Garden: turnovers. UNC has finished with more turnovers than assists in four of its past five games, including 18 in Saturday’s sloppy win against Georgia Tech. While everyone on the team has contributed to the epidemic, Elliot Cadeau’s ball security problems have been especially troubling. The sophomore had a career-high seven turnovers against the Yellow Jackets and now has 23 over his past five games, three of which were losses. “We’ve just got to do a better job of taking care of the basketball,” Davis said. “We were doing that at an elite level at the beginning of the year and since Maui, we’ve averaged more turnovers than assists, and we really hadn’t played a team that’s pressed or trapped or double teamed. We just have to do a better job there.”
- This week is a light one in the ACC, with most schools taking time off for their semester breaks. Given the results, it’s a good opportunity for several teams to regroup and address some of the issues that have plagued them through the early season. Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes is hoping the opportunity to get in the gym for some extended practice time will help his Deacons find the offensive identity they’ve lacked thus far. “We’ve played 11 games in a matter of a month and three days and had maybe 15 practices,” he said. “We need some time to get together.”
