UNC clearly the class of the ACC. Wake Forest might be next ... and still lost by 21
There is absolutely zero doubt at this point that North Carolina is the team to beat in the ACC, not in the least because no one has yet managed to do so. Wake Forest actually led at halftime Monday night, and still lost by 21.
It’s UNC and everyone else. Period. End of story. The Tar Heels have become the team they were supposed to be last season.
As for everyone else, it’s hard to look past the Demon Deacons, who gave North Carolina everything it could handle in the first half Monday before wilting in the second, a persistent road issue for Wake Forest, but that had as much to do with how good North Carolina is as anything else.
The closest anyone’s come at the Smith Center is eight points, and the Tar Heels slapped a 20-2 run on Florida State in that game. Wake Forest was making a run at that number Monday before RJ Davis took over on his way to a career-high 36 points as the Tar Heels pulled away for an 85-64 win.
“There’s not going to be a lot of teams that are going to come in here and win this year,” Wake Forest coach Steve Forbes said. “They’re really good. They’ve proven it on the road too. That’s testament to a really good team. One half doesn’t win a game. That was the case tonight.”
Wake Forest has yet to figure out how to win tough ACC road games — losing to Florida State, N.C. State and now North Carolina — but if the Deacons can solve that riddle, especially on offense, they’ll open doors that have so far been closed to them by their subpar NET rating (42nd going into Monday) and lack of Quadrant 1 wins.
Because of Efton Reid’s delayed debut awaiting a transfer waiver — Wake Forest can thank attorney general Josh Stein’s lawsuit for the fact he’s on the floor at all; better late than never — and Damari Monsanto’s long recovery from the torn patellar tendon he suffered late last season at N.C. State, both perception and the analytics are lagging behind Wake Forest’s true strength.
The great complaint about the NET and its role in seeding, selection and the hated quadrants is that team and conference strength is set in nonconference play and doesn’t move much once conference play starts. Which, most of the time, is actually pretty accurate. Want more respect? Beat better teams when you have the chance.
The ACC had the lowest winning percentage of any power conference in KenPom “A” games, games against top-50 opponents adjusted for road and neutral sites, and with the most opportunities. In Wake’s case, that included losses to Georgia and Utah, long before Reid and Monsanto joined the lineup. In the end, no one cares about that. Everyone deals with injuries and, for a few months this year, waiver issues. You are what your record says you are.
The counterargument is that teams like Wake Forest that rely heavily on transfers take a while to reach their true potential. There’s certainly some truth to that. But it’s college basketball in 2024. Almost everyone relies heavily on transfers. North Carolina didn’t need much time to integrate Harrison Ingram and Cormac Ryan into the group.
Still, there is a bit of a gray area around teams that make great strides after the calendar turns, and in this case it’s kind of an old gold and black area around Wake Forest, which is clearly a better and more dangerous team than it was in November, in part due to circumstances entirely beyond its control.
So the Deacons still have a lot of work to do to get into the NCAA tournament conversation, but it’s work they’re doing. Staying in the fight Monday, let alone finishing the job, would have been a big step forward, especially after last week’s gong-show loss at N.C. State. More opportunities lie ahead, and while there may be ACC teams in better positions as things stand — Duke, obviously, and Clemson as well — there may not be a more dangerous team in the ACC right now, other than the one that thumped Wake Forest on Monday.
“We didn’t want to come in here and get beat like that,” Forbes said. “But there’s so many games left. We haven’t even played half the conference yet. We’ve just got to keep plugging. They will. They’re good guys. We’ve got a long layover. I don’t know why we have nine days. But maybe we need it.”
That the Tar Heels made it look so easy in the second half is a testament to just how good North Carolina is, and how much Davis is lapping the ACC player-of-the-year field at the moment, and how elite the Tar Heels are at both ends of the court.
It’s a shame the ACC tournament isn’t in North Carolina this year, because it’s almost certain three of the Big Four will have byes to the quarterfinals. It’s just a question whether N.C. State can put enough wins together to complete the set, because even after Monday’s thumping, it’s hard to imagine Wake Forest won’t join UNC and Duke among the late arrivals in Washington.
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This story was originally published January 22, 2024 at 9:06 PM.
