Who was the best ACC basketball player of the past decade? | answered by @mattzemek

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ACC QUESTION of WEEK : Who was the best ACC basketball player of the past decade?

Everyone’s method for establishing the best player in a given decade of college basketball will vary. Every person will place a unique emphasis on certain facts and realities, at the expense of others. This doesn’t make my approach more correct or accurate than another person’s; it merely reflects my points of emphasis, my thought process. Everyone else is invited to submit his or her own unique thought process.

With that out of the way, here is my thought process: One can’t select a one-and-done as the best player of a decade. Players needed to make an imprint which was substantial, and which lasted beyond one season. This is not a reflection on how good these players became in the NBA; by that metric, Kyrie Irving would be on the short list, but at Duke, he didn’t leave that big an impression.

Winning national championships and making Final Fours are historic achievements, but they don’t figure into this calculus; that prevents players at non-championship schools from being recognized.

With all of that in mind, here would be my five top players, followed by my number one choice:

Four players in the past decade of ACC basketball — from the 2009-2010 season through the 2018-2019 campaign — made the All-ACC First Team twice: Malcolm Delaney of Virginia Tech, Kyle Singler of Duke, Malcolm Brogdon of Virginia, and Kyle Guy of Virginia. That seems to me to elevate those four players above all others.

Player No. 5 could be any of these choices: Grayson Allen of Duke, Jerian Grant of Notre Dame, Ty Jerome of Virginia, Joel Berry of North Carolina, Justin Jackson of North Carolina, Erick Green of Virginia Tech, John Henson of North Carolina, Nolan Smith of Duke, Luke Maye of North Carolina, Tyler Zeller of North Carolina, Bonzie Colson of Notre Dame, and Olivier Hanlan of Boston College.

When you realize that Duke’s championship teams were five years apart, and that the 2015 team was primarily powered by one-and-dones; that Virginia’s best teams made only one Final Four; and that Notre Dame wasn’t able to make the Final Four this past decade (thought it came very close in 2015), the North Carolina Final Four players on this list have the largest body of achievement. Among those UNC players, Justin Jackson was a core member of two teams which played in the national championship game in 2016 and 2017.

One could make the argument — a debatable one, but a reasonable one — that Joel Berry was more important to the 2017 UNC national championship team than Jackson. However, Jackson was more of a centerpiece player on two separate UNC teams which reached the title game. On that basis, he gets the fifth spot on the All-ACC First Team for the past decade, along with the four players who were two-time All-ACC First-Teamers.

Who is the best player among these five?

When you consider how obscure Virginia basketball had been at the start of the past decade, and how far the program climbed, the man at the heart of UVA’s rise is the player who did the most heavy lifting in ACC basketball the past decade.

That man is Malcolm Brogdon, whose work in the middle of the decade enabled Virginia to finally reach the mountaintop at the end of the decade. Brogdon did not make the Final Four, but he gave Tony Bennett the consistency and toughness which transformed a program and changed the landscape of ACC hoops. He is my selection as the best ACC basketball player of the past decade.

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