Which ACC team is playing the best basketball entering conference play? | answered by @MattZemek

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ACC QUESTION of the WEEK : Which ACC team is playing the best basketball entering conference play?

It is very early in the season, and we don’t know how any team will respond to conference competition after the mixture of cupcakes, mid-tier opponents, and elite foes which comprises non-conference college basketball.

So, it is best to not assign too much weight to this question. Whatever teams have done — or failed to do — before Christmas will become a lot more relevant, or worthless, five weeks from now. ACC play will be the true measure of these teams.

I think ACC fans from all schools can generally agree on a top three for this question, as opposed to identifying one team which stands above the rest.

Duke, Virginia, and North Carolina State are playing the best basketball heading into conference play.

Duke and Virginia aren’t playing elegantly or smoothly, but are impressing because of their ability to win games “in the mud,” when offensive flow is lacking and opposing defenses play their hardest, trying to pull the upset. Duke and Virginia are receiving the best efforts of opponents and are parrying those thrusts. They haven’t looked like dominant teams in 40-minute games, but there are eight-minute stretches within games when you are reminded how great these teams can become. You saw Duke turn on the jets against Texas Tech Thursday night in Madison Square Garden. You have seen Virginia’s pack line defense apply the clamps to an opponent for extended stretches of time this season, including the VCU game, when the Hoos needed that level of defense to merely stay close midway through the second half. Duke and Virginia are studies in resilience, and in minimizing bad stretches of play while maximizing the good ones.

North Carolina State wasn’t exactly pretty or precise in its win over Auburn, but Markell Johnson and Devon Daniels took over that game in the second half and made a loud statement about this team’s ceiling. Now comes the age-old challenge: Can a North Carolina State team set a consistently high standard instead of always playing to the level of its competition? It’s not just a Mark Gottfried thing; it’s an N.C. State thing ever since Jim Valvano left.

Kevin Keatts continues to show how good a coach he is, but he still has to conquer the ACC beast to offer a clear indication that he is ready to take his own coaching career — and the Wolfpack — to the next level.

You can argue about which of these three teams is playing the best heading into ACC action at the start of the new year. I will let you have at it. I will focus on the three teams which have set the pace in non-conference play, obviously knowing that “Roy Williams season” — otherwise known as February — could make this a moot point in a few months.

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