ACC Stock Watch: Post-Challenge Edition
Posted by Matthew Auerbach on December 7th, 2015After a relatively successful aggregate performance during the Feast Week tournaments, the ACC turned in another disappointing result in last week’s ACC/Big Ten Challenge, failing to win the inter-conference event for the seventh consecutive year. It wasn’t all bad last week, though, as North Carolina secured an elite home win against #2 Maryland, and Miami showed some resiliency in responding to its disappointing loss to Northeastern with an overtime win at Nebraska. This week’s Stock Watch zeroes in on a pair of players critical to the fates of two of the league favorites, a school navigating the rest of the non-conference season without its leader and a unit in Raleigh that is struggling to replicate its postseason success of a year ago.
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Brandon Ingram Wonders Why Anyone Doubted Him (USAT Images)
- Brandon Ingram, Duke: After a painfully slow start to his freshman campaign, some wondered if the hype surrounding Duke’s freshman McDonald’s All-American was more bluster than substance. Those folks can stop wasting their time. Ingram had arguably the best week of any player in the nation, scoring a career-high 24 points against Indiana on Wednesday followed by a 23-point performance against Buffalo on Saturday. Most notably against the Hoosiers, Ingram came out with an assertiveness we had yet to see from the lanky wing, scoring eight of his team’s first 10 points, including a pair of three-point field goals. Some may give pause to the opposition — Indiana’s defensive issues are well-documented — but sometimes a player as talented as Ingram just needs to have a few shots go in to gain confidence that this level of basketball isn’t too big for him. Last week was certainly a step in the right direction for the Blue Devils’s star freshman.
- Darius Thompson, Virginia: It was a popular assumption that the Tennessee transfer would be the most likely candidate to fill the void left when Justin Anderson bolted the program for the NBA. The 6’4” sophomore looked like anything but that through the team’s first six contests, but with point guard London Perrantes sidelined last week after an appendectomy, Thompson capably played Robin to Malcolm Brogdon’s Batman. Inserted into the starting lineup, Thompson logged 36 minutes in each of the Cavaliers’ last two victories. His 12 points were second only to Brogdon’s 22 in Tuesday’s win at Ohio State, and he followed that up with another dozen points along with four steals and an emasculation in a winning effort against William & Mary. The numbers indicate that Thompson is finding a comfort level within Tony Bennett’s offense, a development that is certain to needle ACC foes for the rest of the year.
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Last Week’s Game Versus Wisconsin Was Jim Boeheim’s Last For a While (USA Today Images)
- Syracuse: It was a rough week for the Orange both on and off the court. After an impressive showing in winning the Battle 4 Atlantis, Syracuse was outlasted at home in overtime by a scuffling Wisconsin club that had dropped three of its first seven games of the season. Mere hours after that result, Jim Boeheim was informed by the NCAA that his nine-game suspension would be upheld and it would become effective immediately, sidelining the Hall of Famer for his team’s emotionally charged matchup with longtime Big East foe Georgetown on Saturday. Having almost no time to prepare for its first game without Boeheim manning the bench since he missed three games in 2001-02 because of prostate cancer, the Hoyas dominated Syracuse from start to finish in a 79-72 defeat. This was an impossibly difficult spot for the Orange, and after having everything break right for them in the Bahamas, last week was defined by Murphy’s Law. The truth is that Syracuse isn’t as good as we thought they were after Thanksgiving and they’re certainly not as bad as they looked during a tumultuous last week.
- NC State’s Front Line: Conventional wisdom gave the Wolfpack’s starting bigs a huge advantage against Michigan on Tuesday night, as the Wolverines arrived in Raleigh employing a four-guard starting lineup. Instead, the duo of Lennard Freeman and Abdul Malik-Abu provided a lackluster effort resulting in a combined two points and seven boards. Neither made a single shot from the field, and they were routinely outworked by their smaller and less athletically gifted counterparts. And while the pair’s production increased in Saturday’s win over Bucknell, the Bison’s starting front line still found little resistance in scoring 43 points on 17-of-27 shooting from the floor. Through the first quarter of the season, NC State is simply too reliant on its perimeter play, namely that of Cat Barber, to really be taken seriously as a league contender. For the Pack to realize its full potential, Mark Gottfried needs the Freeman and Abu who combined for 24/24 in their upset victory of Villanova in the Round of 32 in last year’s NCAA Tournament to return to Raleigh.
