A collection of thoughts and reflections on this season and the future.
UConn
UConn 2024 is probably the best college basketball team since Duke 2001. When you consider the totality of their accomplishments – overall record, win quality, margin of victory (especially in the tournament), offensive and defensive efficiency, balance and completeness in all phases – I think that statement is justified. I am not going to say they are better than Duke 2001.
Dan Hurley asserted that UConn’s back-to-back was more impressive than 2006-2007 Florida and 1991-1992 Duke, because those teams had essentially the same team coming back whereas UConn had to replace a lot of minutes. He’s right, and I think he has a point.
NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player
With all due respect to Tristen Newton, who is a terrific player and was great in the tournament, the best player in the tournament was clearly Zach Edey. I find it hard to believe that anyone who actually watched the tournament would disagree with that. Why, then, are we beholden to an unwritten rule that the MOP must be from the team that wins the tournament? Is it possibly because that would mess up the made-for-TV moment where the MOP is awarded and interviewed while the championship team is being celebrated?
Well, that’s a dumb reason. Give the MOP to the MOP. If that makes for awkward TV, so be it.
The State of the ACC
It has been well-publicized that the ACC has performed well in the past several NCAA Tournaments, despite being down in the NET and receiving relatively few bids. Other leagues are accused of “manipulating the NET” to boost their conference’s profile.
The truth here is very hard to untangle. I take as much pride as anyone in the ACC’s NCAA Tournament success, but it is a relatively small sample size, and it is dangerous to generalize that the conference is as good as ever based strictly on that. Regarding charges of NET manipulation, I haven’t seen compelling evidence either way. It is true that margin of victory matters in the NET, and I don’t doubt that certain teams, and possibly leagues, are trying to exploit that to their advantage. How much that is actually impacting the NET, I don’t know, because the formula is a secret. And how much weight the selection committee is giving to the NET is also hard to say.
With my bracketology hat on, I don’t see any evidence that the selection committee is considering conference affiliation. They aren’t giving special dispensation to the ACC or to any other league so far as I can tell. They are considering each team individually as best they can, which is really the only fair way to do it.
My general opinion is that there is scarcely a dime’s worth of difference between the ACC and the other Power 5/6 conferences. (Something weird is going on with the Mountain West, but I don’t want to get sidetracked on that right now.) If the ACC has an intangible advantage, I think it’s coaching. A few years ago, you had Roy, Coach K, Boeheim, Bennett, Larranaga, Hamilton… Brownell is an outstanding coach, Mike Young is a very good coach, Capel has shown himself to be a quality coach, Steve Forbes appears to be a good coach, and I guess you can now add Keatts to that list. I don’t think any other conference can match that depth of coaching ability.
Obviously the retirement of K, Roy, and Boeheim changes things somewhat. It remains to be seen whether those programs will be able to maintain their level. Early returns for Scheyer and Hubert Davis are mostly positive, but the shoes they have to fill are so big, it’s much easier for those programs to get worse than it is to get better. Boeheim’s program had already slipped and it’s anybody’s guess what Adrian Autry will be able to do.
Hamilton and Larranaga are both in their mid-70s and have to be nearing the end of the line. Neither of those programs has great tradition to fall back on. You could see them falling back if they don’t make the right hire. Virginia and Tony Bennett also seem to be at a crossroads… he does not seem to have figured out how to build a roster that can execute his style at a high level in the new transfer portal era. Clearly he is a great coach and I would bet on him to figure it out.
Louisville will bounce back. Obviously there is nowhere to go but up from this year, but they have so much tradition, it seems highly probable that they will rebound to at least competitiveness if not excellence. I like what I saw of Damon Stoudamire at Georgia Tech this year although that seems like a tough place to win. I’m also betting on Micah Shrewsberry to succeed at Notre Dame.
Then there’s the addition of Stanford, SMU, and Cal. None of those programs brings great tradition to the league. It’s tempting to think the ACC will “lift” them, but that hasn’t happened with other programs historically. The Andy Enfield hire at SMU is promising, and he said explicitly that he wouldn’t have come had SMU not been going to the ACC. But in general, it seems more likely that these additions will bring the league down than lift it up.
Then there’s the specter of conference realignment, with FSU and Clemson suing the league and rumors abounding about other potential changes.
So for all those reasons, it seems like an unusually unstable and uncertain time for the league. After Duke and Carolina, the second-tier coaching is strong, and between Bennett, Brownell, Capel, Young, Keatts, Forbes, and maybe now Enfield, you’re going to have some teams emerge from that pack and have great success from time to time, as Miami did in 2023 and NC State did this year. But a return to the ACC’s status as the premier basketball conference probably depends on whether Duke and Carolina can continue to be among the top five or so programs in the country, and to a lesser degree, whether Louisville can rebound.
NC State’s Place in History
You knew I would have to talk about the Wolfpack. A lot of superlatives have been sent their way, deservedly so. Jay Bilas described their run as “the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in college basketball”, which is very strong language, but I don’t think he used that phrase loosely, I think he meant it.
Let’s start with the ACC Tournament. Was NC State the most unlikely champion ever? I think, all things considered, they probably were. The contenders would be:
- Virginia 1976 (13-11/4-8 going into the tournament, 6th of 7)
- NC State 1983 (17-10/8-6, tied for 3rd of 8)
- NC State 1987 (17-13/6-8, 6th of 8)
- Georgia Tech 1993 (16-10/8-8, 6th of 9)
- Maryland 2004 (16-11/7-9, 6th of 9)
- NC State 2024 (17-14/9-11, 10th of 15)
Narrowing it down further, 1983 NC State, 1987 NC State, 1993 Georgia Tech, and 2004 Maryland were all teams that were nationally ranked during the season and had excellent non-conference wins; they were just beaten down by the ACC meat grinder and, in some cases, injuries. This year’s NC State team never sniffed the Top 25, had no good nonconference wins, was never thought of as even being on the NCAA Tournament bubble, and had no injuries to blame it on. So I think the competition really comes down to 1976 Virginia vs. 2024 NC State.
You could make an argument for either of these teams. That Virginia team’s run was no less unexpected than NC State’s run this year, partially because of Virginia’s dismal history in the ACC Tournament. But that was a sneaky good team. They had lost five games to top 10 teams during the season by an average of 3.6 points. It was the type of team that, if kenpom had existed, would have been a Top 40 team with a very bad Luck rating.
Like NC State, 1976 Virginia had to beat the #3, #2, and #1 seeds to win the championship. Of course, NC State had to win two additional games to even get to that point. I think the fatigue aspect of “five games in five days” is probably overblown. The more significant aspect is that those two additional games are two more opportunities to lose. Just to get to the same starting point as Virginia 1976, NC State had to beat a talented if underachieving Louisville team that played its best game of the year followed by a pretty good Syracuse team that had already beaten them twice in the regular season.
In any event, both teams have a case. In terms of win probability, I think NC State 2024 probably had the lowest going-in win probability of any eventual tournament champion in the history of the event. But if you want to argue that Virginia 1976 is the most unlikely champion, I won’t quibble with you. Either way, NC State 2024 is at worst the second-least likely tournament champ in the 70-year history of the tournament.
Then there is the Final Four run. Where does the Wolfpack rank in terms of most unlikely Final Four teams? Well, they were the sixth #11 seed to make it, the others being 1986 LSU, 2006 George Mason, 2011 VCU, 2018 Loyola, and 2021 UCLA. 1986 LSU was a very talented team that was ranked in the Top 25 for a lot of the season. 2006 George Mason, 2011 VCU, and 2021 UCLA received at-large bids, which NC State most definitely would not have. 2018 Loyola received an automatic bid; it’s unclear whether they would have received an at-large bid as they were considered to be on the bubble. So one way to look at it is, the Wolfpack are the only team ever to make the Final Four who was not at-large worthy.
Looking at kenpom rankings going into the tournament, 2011 VCU was #84, 2018 Loyola was #41, and 2021 UCLA was #45. 2024 NC State was #56, and that was after winning the ACC Tournament. Kenpom doesn’t go back to 1986, but there is no doubt whatsoever that LSU would have been much higher than #56, and the same is true for 2006 George Mason.
On the basis of this evidence, I would probably say that 2011 VCU is the most unlikely Final Four team ever. They lost four of their last five regular season games, they didn’t win the CAA Tournament, they were #84 in kenpom, and they were in the First Four, meaning they had to win five games just to make the Final Four. On paper, there was nothing in their record to suggest what was about to happen. What’s more, they didn’t have an easy road, having to beat the #3 and #1 seeds to make the Final Four. (I don’t think it was the most unlikely NCAA Tournament run ever; I would award that to the 15-seed St. Peter’s team from 2022 that made the Elite Eight.)
2021 UCLA was similar. In the First Four, had to win five games to make it, had to beat #2 and #1 on the way.
2018 Loyola got a couple of breaks. They were in the same region as the Virginia team that lost to UMBC. #2 seed Cincinnati also lost in the second round, so the best team the Ramblers had to beat was #3 Tennessee.
To summarize, I don’t think NC State is the most unlikely Final Four team ever, but I would throw them in with 2018 Loyola and 2021 UCLA and say they were one of the four most unlikely.
It’s really the combination of the two highly unlikely events that makes the Wolfpack’s run completely unique in the history of college basketball. You heard lots of comparisons to 2011 UConn, but that UConn team was a much better team. They were ranked in the Top 25 all year. They were #26 in kenpom. They had four wins over Top 10 teams in the regular season. They had a first-team All-American in Kemba Walker. They finished ninth in a 16-team Big East, which is why they had to play five games in five days.
I’ve been working on a series of the 50 greatest teams in ACC history. Yesterday I thought, wait – do I need to stop in midstream and put NC State 2024 on the list? In a sense that seems ridiculous for a team that lost 14 games, but consider this. There are 25 other ACC teams that won the ACC Championship and made the Final Four. Of those 25, all are on my list but one (1997 North Carolina, and they would probably be #51).
It underscores the uniqueness of this team. There isn’t another team like this in the history of college basketball, and there may never be again.
NC State – Other Learnings and Observations
Defense – The most surprising aspect of this run was the improvement on defense. In State’s last nine games, their average adjusted defensive efficiency was 89.5. Extended to a full season, that would have been the third best defense in the country after Iowa State and Houston. The players themselves frequently cited their “connectedness” on defense when asked what sparked this run.
How do you explain this seemingly sudden improvement? I think it was a combination of several things: 1) A tighter, more stable rotation with the same seven players getting all the minutes. They really started to anticipate and trust each other. 2) Exceptional effort. This was visible especially with the perimeter defenders such as Morsell and O’Connell. They were defending max effort on every possession in the postseason. 3) Diarra and Middlebrooks. It’s extremely valuable to have big guys who can protect the rim but are athletic enough to switch onto a guard without creating an obvious mismatch. In the postseason, State really figured out how to turn that into an advantage. 4) Great coaching. Great offense can happen in spite of bad coaching if you have great individual offensive players, but great team defense never happens by accident. 5) Luck with opponents not shooting well. There were a lot of open threes during this run that did not go in.
Intangibles and the Eye Test – I’m a pretty analytical guy. My general approach to trying to analyze basketball tends to start with looking at offensive and defensive efficiency, the Four Factors, kenpom, all that.
If ever there was a testament to the limitations of that approach, this team was it. It was almost laughable as State marched through the NCAA Tournament to see the so-called experts, game after game, pick them to lose. Or reseed the remaining teams and put them at the bottom. And when you peeled back their logic, it was usually based on kenpom.
But when you actually watched the games, it was obvious they were better than the teams they were playing. They completely controlled the games against Texas Tech and Marquette. They were down at half against Duke, but they still looked better, and once they started making shots in the second half, Duke was powerless to do anything about it.
At that point, State’s kenpom ranking had become irrelevant. They bore no resemblance to the team from December and January that compiled a lot of the numbers that went into their kenpom. Especially in the transfer portal era with so much roster turnover, it takes time for a team to come together, and the March team may look very different from the December team. Once State started playing so well in March, suddenly everyone could see what Kevin Keatts had probably seen in his mind’s eye when he put this roster together.
I’m not going to throw away analytics; I’d have to change the name of my blog if I did. There is still a lot of great information embedded in the data. For example, State’s improvement on offense in the second half of the season was evident in the analytics, even if it wasn’t reflected in their win-loss record. But the reductionist analytics approach (which I have been guilty of) that reduces a team to its kenpom Efficiency Margin is a lazy way to analyze basketball, and it cannot accurately assess a team like NC State.
The Mojo– one of my favorite things in sports is watching a team get on a postseason run where they are playing with absolute, 100% confidence, belief, and trust. I call it The Mojo. It’s something intangible, but you know it when you see it. Psychologically, I think it equates to something like ultimate confidence. It’s what happens when a team’s confidence becomes so deeply rooted and unshakable as a result of repeated success that no matter what happens, they maintain complete belief and commitment. The 2023 Braves had The Mojo. 2022 North Carolina got The Mojo. And that’s where I think 2024 NC State got to in the postseason.
One of the characteristics of a team with The Mojo is that it raises individual players to play above themselves. How did DJ Burns and Michael O’Connell suddenly get better in the postseason, 120+ college basketball games into their careers? It’s The Mojo.
The Mojo doesn’t happen overnight. It’s always the result of sustained success. For this team, I think the second half of the Syracuse game is where you started to see it. State dominated that half in an unexpected manner, and that performance set them up with a lot of confidence going into the Duke game. That confidence continued to build with each win. The Virginia game, with the way it ended, gave them a sense that perhaps they were destiny’s team. By the time they got to the Carolina game, they had crossed the threshold from mere confidence to The Mojo. In that sense, I think the five games helped them. Had they just showed up to play Duke without the first two games against Louisville and Syracuse, I doubt they would have won.
Luck – Did State get lucky to win the Virginia game? Well, yes and no.
I think sometimes we confuse improbable with lucky. When Stephen Curry hits a 60-footer, it’s improbable, but it’s not lucky. In fact, it’s actually the opposite of luck. If Curry makes that shot it’s because he’s a great basketball player. Luck would mean that the outcome is essentially random, that a bad player and a good player would have an equal chance. That’s obviously not the case here. Yes, it’s improbable, he probably wouldn’t make it more than one out of twenty, but it’s not lucky.
That’s how I think of the Michael O’Connell shot. It wasn’t lucky. It was a great if improbable shot by a good basketball player. What was lucky was McKneely missing the free throw.
The Margin – I am constantly amazed at how slim the margins are between success and failure at the highest levels of athletics. If the O’Connell shot doesn’t go in, none of this happens. Kevin Keatts wouldn’t be any worse a coach if that shot hadn’t gone in, but think how different the perception would be. How many potential 2024 NC States have there been over the years whose Michael O’Connell shot just didn’t go in?
The Future – What does this run mean for the program going forward? Here are a few thoughts and observations.
Expect State to be overrated going into next year. There is a long history of that with teams that make unexpected postseason runs. Look at Carolina after their 2022 run, or Georgia Tech after their 2004 run, or Duke after their 1978 run, or any number of other examples. It always happens.
I have no idea who will come back. Burns, Horne, and Morsell have no more eligibility. Diarra, Middlebrooks, Taylor, O’Connell, and Dennis Parker have eligibility left, but in this day and age, you really never know. Brandon Huntley-Hatfield from Louisville looks like a good addition. If Diarra and Middlebrooks return, their frontcourt seems set, but they need shooting and scoring in the backcourt.
What State did this year is obviously not repeatable. You can’t count on runs from 9-11 in the ACC to the Final Four to sustain your program. If they continue to hang around .500 in the ACC, they will remain what they had been under Kevin Keatts before this run: a middle-of-the-pack ACC team that is hanging around the NCAA Tournament bubble most years.
The real question is whether Keatts either a) has figured some things out and become a better coach and/or b) can leverage the positive energy created by this run to take the program to another level.
I think we have to acknowledge the possibility that Keatts has just become a better coach, not that he was bad to begin with. He has shown he can construct rosters that can win in the transfer portal era. He has shown he can take a bunch of new guys and make a team out of them. He has shown he can put together a really good defensive team, which he had never done before this year. It has always bothered me that his teams don’t have an obviously recognizable style, but this team shows the positive side of having a versatile team that can win in a lot of different ways. He showed the ability to adapt his style to the personnel he had, most obviously in how they used DJ Burns.
Clearly this run has generated a tremendous amount of positive national attention for the program. Keatts is a likable guy, a players coach. Their team played hard, had fun, and mostly behaved themselves. It certainly looked like a program a lot of players would want to be a part of. They have a level of national prominence at this moment they haven’t seen since the Jimmy V era. The fan base is highly energized. There will be more butts in seats next year. There will be an infusion of NIL money. It seems like a golden opportunity to get and keep higher level players, whether freshman recruits or transfers.
But the window will not stay open for long. Our memories are short. If they revert back to the pre-2024 NC State for the next season or two, all that positive energy will dissipate, and this season will become an anomaly, not the new and improved NC State.
What, specifically, do they need to do? It’s hard to say with exactness, but in general, it needs to feel like the program is elevated above the pre-2024 Keatts-era level. That probably translates into some combination of making the NCAA Tournament (preferably without being on the bubble) and winning a game or two, being in the Top 25 some of the time, and making some noise in the ACC Tournament (which I define as semifinals and beyond).
And with that, I will wrap it up for this college basketball season. I will soon be resuming my march through the 50 greatest teams in ACC history.