Mick Cronin made headlines last week by lamenting over his team’s travel schedule now that UCLA is a member of the Big Ten. “We’ve seen the Statue of Liberty twice in three weeks,” he said.
Cal and Stanford have also piled up their share of frequent flyer miles this season. While they haven’t done as much sightseeing as their California cousin apparently has, the newest members of the ACC are doing a much better job of dealing with the grind. “This is what we signed up for and there’s no sense complaining about it,” Stanford coach Kyle Smith said after his team knocked off North Carolina, 72-71, in Chapel Hill on Saturday. “It builds a little mental toughness.”
The Bears and Cardinal showed a lot of that toughness during their second Eastern swing of the conference schedule last week. Both teams went 1-1 with Cal beating NC State on Saturday, three days after a loss at North Carolina, while Stanford bounced back from a loss at Wake Forest by rallying late for its first win in 14 all-time meetings with the Tar Heels.
“It’s a great privilege and opportunity to be part of the ACC,” Cal’s Mark Madsen said. “With that, of course, there are challenges.”
Those challenges range from the discomfort of spending long hours in cramped airline seats to the fatigue associated with jet lag and returning home from road trips at a time of day when everyone else is just waking up. Not to mention the Bears had a three-hour flight delay after their Jan. 4 loss at Clemson.
Madsen, who played nine seasons with the Lakers and Timberwolves, likened the travel to those of his days in the NBA. Only instead of playing five or six games on one extended opposite-coast excursion, Cal and Stanford are making four two-game trips while also trying to stay up-to-date on schoolwork. It’s a juggling act that has led to adjustments in the way Madsen prepares his team. “Our practices need to be more efficient and our players need to get plenty of rest,” he said. “We need to custom tailor to that reality.”
Stanford’s players have credited trainer Learie Jones and strength coach Michael Robinson with helping them prepare before games and recover afterward. They’ve also taken an active role in easing the mental strain of their travel schedule by putting a positive spin on the experience. “In my experience as a student-athlete, there’s nothing better than going on the road,” senior guard Jaylen Blakes said. “We’re gone for a week and you’re spending time with your brothers, building relationships that will last a lifetime.”
Pat Kelsey has the Cardinals flying high again
The conference schedule hasn’t reached the halfway mark yet, but the league office in Charlotte can start engraving Pat Kelsey’s name on the ACC’s Coach of the Year plaque. Even if Jon Scheyer and Duke run the table and go 20-0 in the ACC with its cast of McDonald’s All-Americans, it’s hard to imagine anyone in college basketball doing a better job than Louisville’s first-year coach.
Kelsey has done more than just clean up the industrial-strength mess left for him by his predecessor Kenny Payne. He has the Cardinals trending toward the top of the ACC and back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2019. And he’s done it faster than anyone could have imagined.
Louisville’s 85-61 win at Syracuse last Tuesday was its 13th of the season. That’s one more than it won in two full seasons under Payne. The Cardinals added to that total Saturday by going on the road and beating Virginia to extend their winning streak to eight and improve their conference record to 7-1, one game behind league-leading Duke. Louisville’s five losses are all to teams that were ranked at the time they played.
That in itself is worthy of recognition. Kelsey’s reclamation project, however, has been even more remarkable considering the adversity he’s overcome. First, he had to completely rebuild a roster that had only one returning player when he arrived from College of Charleston last spring. Then just as his 12 transfers began molding into a cohesive unit and picking up steam, including a 28-point beatdown of Indiana in the Bahamas, a rash of injuries forced Kelsey to change directions and reinvent things on the fly. “One of the fun things, to me, about coaching is figuring it out,” Kelsey said. “Good things happen. Bad things happen. It’s helping your team get on to the next thing and respond the right way.”
Left shorthanded and shorter than expected without big man Kasean Pryor and several others, Kelsey slowed down the tempo, toned down the team’s aggressiveness on defense and began attacking opponents from long range instead of close to the basket. Louisville’s 580 three-point attempts are 79 more than anyone else in the ACC.
Although the Cardinals don’t convert an especially high percentage of those shots, they hit enough – with Indiana transfer Chucky Hepburn and Charleston expat Reyene Smith leading the way – to make the strategy work. “It took a little bit for it to get our footing back and to figure out our new way,” Kelsey said. “But I really feel like our guys adapted well and we have some good momentum going right now.”
Around the rim
- Jaden Schutt and Jaylen Blakes may have left Duke in search of bigger roles elsewhere, but both clearly still have a feel for the rivalries that make the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle such a college basketball hotbed. On Wednesday, Shutt, a 6-foot-5 sophomore guard at Virginia Tech, came off the bench to score 17 points, including the go-ahead free throws with 2.3 seconds remaining to rally the Hokies from a double-digit deficit to a 79-76 win against NC State.
Three nights later, Blakes did him one better. A lightly-used reserve who never got a chance to play significant minutes against rival UNC during his three seasons with the Blue Devils, the senior guard finally got his Smith Center moment when he hit the game-winning jumper with 1.5 seconds left to help his new team, Stanford, stun the Tar Heels on Saturday. “I still have Duke blood in me,” he said. “I would be lying if I said I didn’t think about this moment the night before the game.”
- At No. 76 in the NET rankings, Wake Forest still has a long way to go to get itself on the right side of the NCAA bubble. But the Deacons are headed in the right direction. They’ve won five straight to improve to 14-4 overall. They are 6-1 in the ACC for the first time since Tim Duncan’s senior season of 1996-97.
A big reason for the surge has been the play of All-ACC guard Hunter Sallis. The former Gonzaga transfer has scored 20 or more points in each of the victories, all of which have come since he was moved off the ball and 6-foot sophomore point guard Ty-Laur Johnson was moved into the starting lineup. Sallis hasn’t just been scoring in volume, he’s been doing it at just the right time. He accounted for Wake’s final 11 points to help seal an 88-78 win at Miami on Jan. 11 and then hit for 18 points in the last 12 minutes to help pull away from Stanford last Wednesday. “If he gets going downhill, he’s hard to guard,” coach Steve Forbes said of Sallis. “He’s a really good player.”
- Pittsburgh was considered to be the second-best team in the ACC when it came to Cameron Indoor Stadium for a showdown with Duke on Jan. 7. The Panthers suffered a 29-point embarrassment that night and haven’t been the same since. They put themselves into bubble trouble by dropping their next three and the frustration of the ill-timed four-game losing streak is starting to show.
It hit a boiling point for coach Jeff Capel after Florida State’s Malique Erwin dunked in the final seconds to punctuate his team’s 82-70 win on Wednesday. Capel confronted Erwin in the postgame handshake line, prompting a scuffle that forced security guards to intervene. That the altercation took place against a Seminoles team coached by Leonard Hamilton is ironic, considering that only two days earlier on the ACC’s weekly coaches conference call, Capel said that Hamilton was one of his earliest coaching influences. “There weren’t many black coaches at the Division I level. He was one,” Capel said. “He’s someone I have great admiration for, someone I look up to in this profession.”
- N.C. State had to win five games in as many days last spring to earn its ACC Tournament championship and the opportunity to make its equally improbable run to the Final Four. After losing five of six games since New Year’s Eve – four of them by three points or fewer – Kevin Keatts’ team will likely need another miracle to have any shot at another postseason run. And not just March Madness. Because of expansion, there’s no guarantee the Wolfpack will even make it to the ACC Tournament. The bottom three teams in the league standings will be excluded from the 15-team field. Miami (0-7), Boston College (1-6) and Virginia (1-6) are currently the odd teams out. But at 2-5, N.C. State has no margin for error, especially with top teams SMU, Duke and Clemson coming up next on the schedule.