It feels unreasonable to start any basketball related activity without the acknowledgement of the recent tragic passing of Kobe Bryant. Kobe was a single name icon whose reach stretched far beyond the 94 feet of the basketball court — yet it was through his majesty there that the world was introduced to him. From a basketball perspective, his influences are evident at all levels — every time a guard uses precise footwork to create space for a fadeaway, or when a defender guards his man with the ferocity of a lion trying to acquire his last meal. His death, so shocking and sad, shines a light on how transcendent he had become elsewhere in his life — the way people who had never met him feel a tremendous sense of grief and loss. Making people feel, and inspiring them to live their lives with a certain tenacity, seems like something that would put a smile on Kobe Bryant’s face and perhaps even outweigh his brilliant accomplishments in the game he so adored.

Stock Rising

Roy and the boys. It took six tries, but Roy Williams mercifully and finally eclipsed the win total of his mentor and idol, the iconic Dean Smith, in Saturday’s trouncing of Miami. This has been an unusually trying season for the Hall of Famer, who has won 78 percent of his games in amassing 881 victories, so the overall perspective on his accomplishment may have been lost in the relief of finally ending a five-game losing skein. The Tar Heels then backed up their best offensive output of the year (94 points against Miami) with a crippling body blow on Monday to intrastate rival NC State, beating the Wolfpack for the seventh consecutive time in Raleigh and winning its first true road game since November 8.

Monday’s star was once again junior Garrison Brooks, who has now logged double-doubles in seven of his last eight games. Brooks was a one-man wrecking crew in Blacksburg last week, scoring 28 points, grabbing 13 rebounds and dishing out six assists in a heartbreaking double-overtime loss to the Hokies. Effort and execution were heightened a notch that night, causing North Carolina to look at least competent, albeit still considerably shy of a vintage Williams’ outfit.

With the carrot of Cole Anthony’s return still dangling in front of the team, along with Brooks’ recent emergence, North Carolina could presumably be a team to deal with in Greensboro. From now until then, though, Williams will look to add as many wins to that unbelievable career mark while hoping to get his club to relatively good health. Even in last night’s win, Brandon Robinson, who has been hampered with ailments all year, had to leave the floor multiple times, dealing with both a lingering ankle issue and a new rib injury.

Stock Falling

Back to back losses by previously unbeaten Duke have opened up the standings at the top of the league, as Florida State and Louisville are now tied for the conference lead at 6-1. Below those three schools, however, is an unusually soft middle, littered with a number of teams that have proven capable of pushing their respective seasons in either direction during the final six weeks.  One of those teams leads our stock report this week.

Stock Rising

Syracuse. After an 8-7 start, the Orange have reeled off three consecutive victories, putting themselves squarely back in the conversation for an NCAA Tournament berth. Generally speaking, Syracuse seasons turn most often on a tightening of the defensive screws, but this turnabout has been sparked by an offensive renaissance, highlighted by an uncommon adeptness from beyond the arc.

In the last nine seasons, Syracuse finished among the top 100 in three-point shooting just once. This year, however, the Orange rank 49th, at a respectable 36.3 percent, with 170 total makes. Armed with the league’s two most prolific long-range shooters in Buddy Boeheim and Elijah Hughes, Syracuse has shifted its style to fit those pieces, taking nearly 46 percent of its field goal attempts outside of the arc. This represents the highest percentage of those shots by a Jim Boeheim squad in the KenPom era.

While Hughes was the centerpiece of any Syracuse success this year, the coach’s son was far from a known commodity after experiencing some struggles. But, Boeheim came into his sophomore year confident and improved, and his recent heater has resulted in 67 made triples, good for fifth nationally. His 16.2 PPG, combined with Hughes’ 19.3 PPG, make the duo the highest scoring pair in the ACC, giving aid to a Syracuse defense which rates surprisingly low this season (96th) in defensive efficiency. In fact, if the Orange finish in that range, it would represent the second-worst defensive unit for Boeheim in the KenPom era.

In an unusually mediocre year for the league, the team that captures the ACC crown may just end up being the hottest outfit, warts and all. Syracuse may have found something here, playing to its strengths offensively and hoping that its historically good defensive scheme can overcome non-ideal personnel. Its remaining schedule is manageable enough, but if the two sharpshooters remain hot, it is conceivable that Syracuse could head to Greensboro in March as a top-three seed.

Stock Also Rising

David Johnson, Louisville. Let’s stay positive this week: Hello to Virginia’s presence on the bubble, and North Carolina’s cellar-dwelling. But even the most pollyanna of Louisville supporters acknowledged that the team’s point guard play could prove to be the factor that holds the team back from achieving its maximum potential. But, following his two best games as a collegian, freshman David Johnson went a long way in allaying some of those concerns.

Good in the mid-week victory at Pittsburgh, Johnson was dynamite in the upset of Duke, leading the Cardinals with a career-high 19 points and seven assists. Named the league’s Freshman of the Week after nearly eclipsing his entire year’s production in two victories, Johnson is a player who possesses elite size at the point guard position. Johnson sustained a shoulder injury with three minutes remaining in Saturday’s contest, but all indications are the injury is reportedly nowhere near as serious as the shoulder ailment that caused him to miss the first four games of his rookie campaign. If healthy, Johnson could be the missing ingredient to elevate Chris Mack’s club back into the conversation of the nation’s elite.

Stock Rising

Clemson. Weeks don’t come much better than this, football results notwithstanding, as the Tigers backed up an historic victory in Chapel Hill with a home stunner over conference unbeaten Duke on Tuesday night. Given the state of North Carolina basketball this winter, there was a reasonable expectation that this year’s opportunity was ripe for Clemson to put a halt to the mind-numbing string of 59 consecutive losses on the road. There was no such assumption, however, when #3 Duke came to town, but the Tigers put together their best 40-minute effort of the season on their way to upending the top-rated KenPom outfit in impressive fashion.

While the headlines were focused on snapping the ignominious and unprecedented losing streak at North Carolina, the details paint a less optimistic picture. The Tigers needed a miraculous comeback — they were down 10 points inside two minutes in Chapel Hill — just to force overtime, where they ultimately outlasted the Tar Heels. But the good vibes and positive momentum weren’t going to be good enough to take down Duke, who has been running roughshod through a very down ACC, and had seemingly separated itself as the team to beat. Instead, though, the 9-7 Tigers put together a remarkably well-balanced performance in handing Duke its first loss since an upset to Stephen F. Austin on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Clemson shot a scorching 56.6 percent from the floor, the best clip by a Blue Devils’ opponent in nearly six years. Perhaps even more pertinent to the upset was the Tigers’ ability to keep Duke from converting second-chance opportunities. This is not a vintage Duke team from the perimeter, but they have been able to maul teams on the offensive glass, rebounding their misses at the seventh-best rate in the country (37.2% Off Reb). Tuesday, Clemson limited Duke to just four offensive rebounds, and that, combined with its blistering shooting, was the combination that Brad Brownell’s club needed to climb back to .500 in league play and put a bow on one of the school’s most triumphant weeks in hardwood history.

Stock Rising

M.J.Walker. Once considered a possible one-and-done candidate, the former McDonald’s All-American may finally be living up to his immense potential. In Saturday’s upset win over Louisville at the Yum! Center, Walker led the Seminoles with 23 points while making nine of his 13 attempts (including a season-high five threes). Walker has now reached double figures in five of his last six games, and is seemingly rounding into form after missing some time earlier in the year with a nagging leg injury. Once again, Leonard Hamilton’s calling card is great balance, as Florida State sports eight players averaging more than 5.9 points per game, but Walker is the one player with enough upside to carry the team to a deep run in March. While Trent Forrest is the unquestioned leader of the unit, and Devin Vassell’s sophomore production jump has been a very pleasant surprise, the light coming on for Walker may be the development that has the Seminoles vying for a conference title that seems up for grabs.

Stock Holding

Georgia Tech. While the story coming out of Chapel Hill on Saturday was predictably and justifiably centered on the mess that is North Carolina, it is worth noting Georgia Tech’s performance as well. Josh Pastner’s team was ruled ineligible for postseason play before the start of the season, right before coming out of the gates with an opening night upset win at NC State. Since, it has been the sort of nondescript, under the radar season we have grown accustomed to from the Yellow Jackets, so Saturday’s whitewashing of the Tar Heels definitively stands out. The Jackets started the game on a 27-4 run, providing the home team with its largest halftime deficit in the 34-year history of the Smith Center. Point guard Jose Alvarado led the way with 25 points, as Georgia Tech picked up its first victory on the road over the Tar Heels in a decade. Granted these aren’t your grandad’s, dad’s, or even your infant baby’s Tar Heels — especially given the Cole Anthony injury — but nonetheless, it was a great showing by Georgia Tech in a season sure to be devoid of many others.

Concerns about this version of North Carolina had been bubbling since its no-show home blowout loss at the hands of Ohio State two weeks back. Those concerns have now been heightened to crisis level after Sunday’s loss to Wofford, piggybacking the pregame news that star freshman Cole Anthony would be sidelined indefinitely with a knee issue.

Because of the visibility of the game along with the scintillating performance by Anthony, the takeaway of the Tar Heels’ opening night win over Notre Dame now seems silly. The praise for Anthony, breathless as it was, was deserving, as he began the season in a manner few before him have — scoring 34 points, grabbing 11 rebounds and dishing out five assists. In the shadows of the analysis, though, was the fact that Anthony HAD to do that for his team to dispose of an average Notre Dame team, as only Garrison Brooks joined him in double figures.

As the schedule softened, Anthony’s productivity understandably dipped, but his efficiency also stumbled. The freshman hasn’t eclipsed 50 percent field goal shooting since the opener, and he is averaging nearly four turnovers per contest — and if you think there is an intimation that Anthony is the problem, citing these statistics is simply a way to take the opposite position.

With the intra-league docket on pause until New Year’s Eve, now is a good time for coaches to take a breath and evaluate where their teams sit in the wake of just completed holiday tournaments and the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. Finals and the holiday season dilute most schedules prior to the reconvening of the ACC slate, but there are still a few games with intrigue on the horizon. One of those occurs tonight, featuring the team that has established itself as perhaps the favorite to capture the league title.

Stock Rising: Louisville

I had some reluctance to fully buy in to this Louisville ensemble being the league’s best team, but given its performance through nine games, it may be time to cede to the results. The Cardinals were barely tested in seven November victories, winning all but one of those contests by double figures, while defeating zero top-80 KenPom teams. However, in vanquishing Michigan, a team that ran roughshod over stiff competition on its way to winning the Battle 4 Atlantis Tournament, the Cardinals definitively proved worthy of inclusion among the nation’s elite.  Chris Mack’s squad is doing it on both ends of the floor, the only team nationally inside the top five in both offensive and defensive efficiency. A microcosm of that balance is the team’s best player Jordan Nwora, who is about as an efficient three-level scorer as there is in college basketball. The 6’7” junior forward, who tested the draft waters last summer, is also excelling on the defensive end and on the glass, and is currently the leader in the KenPom Player of the Year standings.

In a year devoid of dominant outfits, consistent output needs to be acknowledged, and thus far, no one in the league has come close to the Cardinals’ level of consistency. Tonight, they get another chance to prove their worthiness of the nation’s top ranking against last year’s national runner-up, Texas Tech, at Madison Square Garden. Get past that, and it should be an undefeated Louisville entering Rupp Arena to face intrastate rival Kentucky on December 28.

A week ago on the Eye on College Basketball Podcast, hosts Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander started a benign dialogue aiming to contextualize the greatness of Virginia head coach Tony Bennett. It began with the duo opining on how many games Bennett would be able to win against the Cavaliers’ 2019-20 schedule with a top-10 level Division II roster, and evolved into a more interesting and reasonable hypothetical — how high would Bennett finish with the roster that Danny Manning has at Wake Forest? Neither was willing to pick a Bennett-coached Demon Deacons’ squad lower than sixth, with Norlander capitulating that he could envision a scenario yielding a team that could crack the league’s top four. Such is now the universal adulation of Bennett’s prowess that none of the proclamations of his greatness, in this context or others, feels hyperbolic.

A year ago at this time, despite the fresh wounds of the ignominy of being the first #1 seed to ever lose an NCAA Tournament game to a #16 seed, Bennett was still thought of as one of the games’ premier coaches. The questions remained, fairly or not, however, whether his style could yield a National Championship, a question ultimately put to bed forever last April. With all the subsequent roster turnover (Virginia lost its top three scorers, all three with eligibility remaining), it was fair to expect the Cavaliers to retreat substantially this year — but early returns suggest otherwise.

While Duke’s victory over Kansas in the Champions Classic and Cole Anthony’s historic start have garnered much of the ACC attention, there are some stories under the surface that are also worth noting. Here’s this season’s initial stock report.

Stock Rising

Derryck Thornton Four years after starting his career at one of the ACC’s flagship programs, Thornton has started his final collegiate campaign at a perennial cellar dweller, looking to take advantage of a last chance to alter the narrative of a disappointing career. After reclassifying and getting to Duke a year ahead of schedule, Thornton logged an uninspiring season in Durham before ultimately opting for USC rather than compete for point guard minutes with future one-and-doner Frank Jackson. Things never really materialized as anticipated for him in Los Angeles, and now, as he watches contemporaries like De’Aaron Fox and Lonzo Ball about to sign their second NBA contracts, Thornton is looking to turn it all around in Chestnut Hill. His early returns have been dynamite. Perhaps now maturing into that five-star prospect, Thornton has piloted the Eagles to a trio of early wins, scoring a career-high 23 in the conference-opening win against Wake Forest, following that up with another 22 in a win over a talented South Florida team and handing out five assists in short minutes against High Point. Popular opinion was that this was a make or break year for Jim Christian at the school, and preseason expectations were portending an inevitable break. But a strong start by Thornton has the Eagles feeling a little bit more optimistic.

Stock Holding

Pittsburgh. It’s tough to make sense of an inconsistent 2-1 start by Pittsburgh, but maybe it should be expected given such a youthful roster. After a gritty opening win against a Florida State team that has since authored a dismantling of top-10 Florida in Gainesville, the Panthers dropped a home game to #256 Nicholls State before going back on the road to pull away late from Robert Morris. The central reason for concern regarding a potential leap for Jeff Capel’s club in year two was an inability to stretch the defense. However, in junior college transfer Ryan Murphy, Pittsburgh may have found a perfect fit to complement attack-first guards Xavier Johnson and Trey McGowens. Murphy’s energy and marksmanship shot the Panthers back into the opener against the Seminoles, and his 28 points against Nicholls State nearly singlehandedly avoided the upset. The 6’2” junior has now accounted for half of the Panthers’ 18 triples through the team’s first three contests, and after drawing his first start Tuesday night, he looks to be a fixture for Capel’s squad going forward.

Stock Falling

Jim Boeheim’s Act. After his team’s dreadful opening night performance against Virginia — 34 points on 24 percent shooting — Boeheim lashed out at the ACC, which had the gall in his eyes to “grab the money” and start the season with an intra-league slate to promote the rollout of its newly launched television network. Boeheim has been at this long enough, is certainly smart enough, and is undeniably rich enough, to know that this whole thing is a television show, and that’s why his salary has risen presumably about 40 times to $2.5 million dollars a year over the span of his illustrious 44-year career. Typically, Boeheim doesn’t reach his maximum level of ornery until mid-March when he is defending a weak non-conference schedule, but the combination of opening with the reigning National Champion, and then getting spanked in front of his home crowd, really had him in mid-season form. Fortunately, the Orange will once again play a whole bunch of non-league games (all of them) inside the New York State border before really attacking the teeth of the league docket. His team won’t be any worse, because it won’t face a better defensive unit than Tony Bennett’s Cavaliers, and as Boeheim rightly alluded to, the offenses generally trail the defenses in the early part of the season. And as for Bennett, shouldn’t he have been the coach feeling slighted? His team was forced to open the season on the road at Syracuse? Not a word — just another dominant win, with no whining about it.

Syracuse Burning Question: Can Elijah Hughes and the Orange make enough shots to spend a March off of the bubble?

For a school with pedigree and a track record of sustained basketball excellence, the last half-decade has been somewhat of a slog for Syracuse. Almost perennially the power school at the heart of the bubble conversation, the Orange have lost 13 or more games in each of the last five campaigns. And with four starters gone from a 20-14 squad, Jim Boeheim‘s roster would suggest another March where his disposition is wrought with anxiety.

To avoid that fate, Syracuse will need to make more shots from all over the court. The Orange rated 229th nationally in effective field goal percentage a season ago, and were objectively poor from beyond the arc (229th), in two-point range (213th) and from the charity stripe (260th). The loss of its most accomplished scorer and offensive initiator, Tyus Battle, isn’t a great start on improving that ineptitude, but perhaps a more featured role for Elijah Hughes would pay dividends. Hughes led the team with 87 threes a year ago, and was the most efficient scorer the Orange had by a comfortable margin. However, he often times deferrred to Battle, Oshae Brissett and even Frank Howard, relegated to a catch-and-shoot man. This year, Hughes will undeniably be the alpha dog, and how he handles that elevation will likely tell the story of Syracuse’s season.

Florida State Burning Question: Is this the new normal at Florida State?

Boston College Burning Question: Will the second consecutive early departure sabotage another campaign before it even begins?

Despite what has amounted to a lost decade of hoops in Chestnut Hill, Jim Christian’s charges had a slight glimmer of hope when the 2017-18 season came to a close. Seven league wins, the most since 2013, and an NIT appearance, the first postseason of any kind since the same year, had Boston College excited for a breakthrough last season. However, when half of one of the league’s preeminent backcourts vaulted to the NBA (Jerome Robinson) and the other (Ky Bowman) opted to eschew his final year of eligibility a year later, the Eagles seem destined for yet another year of irrelevance, cemented at the bottom of the ACC standings.

To add injury to insult, the player most equipped to fill the dynamic shoes of Bowman, rising sophomore Wynston Tabbs, will miss the entire year after September knee surgery. Much will therefore fall on the shoulders of former five-star recruit Derryck Thornton, now at his third collegiate stop, and senior Nik Popovic, the team’s leading returning scorer and second-leading rebounder. Expectations are bleak, as Boston College is the only ACC school outside of the KenPom preseason top 100, and if that plays itself out on the floor, it seems unlikely that Christian will be back to steward the Eagles for a seventh season.

Pittsburgh Burning Question: Will Jeff Capel’s progress continue?