Pat Kelsey, overhauled Louisville basketball roster just some of new faces in ACC

Posted by Admin October 8, 2024 Basketball

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These days, the countdown to the college basketball season is a time for acclimating oneself to change.

That’s especially true in the ACC entering the 2024-25 campaign.

Louisville basketball fans know all about new head coach Pat Kelsey and his completely overhauled roster, which was built almost entirely through the NCAA transfer portal. The 49-year-old Cincinnati native is trying to make the program relevant for the right reasons again after it went 12-52 (5-35 ACC) across former coach Kenny Payne‘s dreadful two-year tenure.

To be sure, the Cardinals experienced the most seismic changes in the ACC this offseason; and Kelsey’s rebuild will loom large as it tries to keep pace with others across the country. But there is no shortage of impactful new faces elsewhere.

For starters, the league has expanded from 15 to 18 members and now extends from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. Throw in a talented crop of incoming freshmen and the usual roster upheaval of the portal era, and you have a lot of catching up to do.

Here’s a rundown of all the changes:

Most early ACC projections have not been bullish on new members California, SMU and Stanford. But, no matter how the programs fare in Year 1, their arrival will be felt in a couple of ways.

The first — and most important: Only the top 15 teams in the final regular-season standings will earn spots in the conference tournament, which runs March 11-15 at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.

The second: weeklong cross-country road trips.

SMU is the most intriguing of the new additions entering 2024-25. Its regime change to prepare for the Power Four ranks — firing coach Rob Lanier after a 20-13 season and luring Andy Enfield away from USC — was one of the first dominoes to fall in John Calipari leaving Kentucky after 15 seasons for Arkansas. Enfield signed a group of seven transfers that ranks 40th in the eyes of analytics guru Evan Miyakawa of EvanMiya.com. According to The Athletic, the Mustangs’ roster is among the conference’s top three when it comes to Division I minutes played and 3-pointers made.

Behind Kelsey, Cal’s Mark Madsen was the most active ACC coach in the portal this offseason after losing his top seven players in terms of minutes played during a 13-19 start to his tenure in Berkeley. The Golden Bears’ collection of 10 transfers ranks 32nd on EvanMiya. It’s a step in the right direction for a program looking to cross the 15-win threshold for the first time since 2016-17.

Stanford’s Kyle Smith, who joined the Cardinal from Washington State, rounds out the ACC’s trio of first-year head coaches. He faces the most daunting challenge of the bunch, snapping an NCAA Tournament drought dating back to 2014 with a roster ranking second to last in the conference in DI minutes played and 3s made.

Louisville travels to SMU on Jan. 21. It wraps up the regular season with back-to-back games against Cal (March 5) and Stanford (March 8) at the KFC Yum! Center.

No conference in the country signed more five-star recruits than the ACC’s nine.

They are, in order of their overall ranking on the 247Sports Composite:

Flagg, a 6-foot-9 forward from Maine, is considered a generational talent and the projected No. 1 pick in next year’s NBA draft. If he lives up to the billing, he could become only the fourth freshman to be crowned the Naismith College Player of the Year. And the scary thing is: We’re just scratching the surface of Duke’s vaunted 2024 class as the Blue Devils enter coach Jon Scheyer’s third season as one of the favorites in the ACC and national championship races.

Archrival North Carolina and its two five-star signees will certainly be in the mix with Jackson and Powell as projected one-and-done talent; especially when you consider the Tar Heels are, first and foremost, returning the conference’s reigning Player of the Year in All-American guard RJ Davis.

In the end, the ACC could be decided by which team has amassed the best role players to bolster its star power, which leads us to our final segment.

The ACC’s performance in the transfer portal varies by your trusted source for player evaluations.

For example: On3 and EvanMiya ranked Kelsey’s inaugural Louisville class No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, but it did not crack the top 25 on 247Sports. The highest ACC team on that list was Duke at No. 22, followed by N.C. State at No. 24.

The Cards did, however, lead the conference with four top-100 transfer additions on The Athletic and ESPN‘s big boards. Miami was the only other to land multiple players on both with two apiece.

These standings will, of course, mean nothing when the season tips off Nov. 4 and we see how all the new pieces fit together. It’s also important to note that 11 of the ACC’s 18 teams added fewer than five players through the portal.

Who are the transfers to watch? Very few will be as important to their teams as Terrence Edwards Jr. (James Madison), Chucky Hepburn (Wisconsin), J’Vonne Hadley (Colorado) and Kasean Pryor (South Florida) will be at U of L.

Elsewhere, Duke will need Maliq Brown (Syracuse), Mason Gillis (Purdue) and Sion James (Tulane) to balance its freshman-heavy roster; while Cade Tyson (Belmont) and Ven-Allen Lubin (Vanderbilt) are stepping into big roles at North Carolina. The same goes for Viktor Lakhin (Cincinnati) and Jaeden Zackery (Boston College) at Clemson and Jalen Blackmon (Stetson) and Lynn Kidd (Virginia Tech) at Miami.

Then, there are the former Cards hooping around the league: Matt Cross (SMU), Brandon Huntley-Hatfield (N.C. State), Mike James (N.C. State), Ty-Laur Johnson (Wake Forest) and Jae-Lyn Withers (North Carolina).

Reach Louisville men’s basketball reporter Brooks Holton at bholton@gannett.com and follow him on X at @brooksHolton.