With heaping helpings of “dunks dulac” and “small-ball,” the Notre Dame men’s basketball team is 17-2 overall and 5-1 in the ACC as they round into the final twelve games of the regular season and they’ve cracked the nation’s Top Ten, coming in at number eight in the most recent AP rankings. With wins over North Carolina and Michigan State, 15th-year head coach Mike Brey’s cagers have steadily risen through the Top Twenty-Five since first breaking in back in week five. With upcoming games against fifth-ranked Duke, first at home on the 28th and then away on February 7, and tenth-ranked Louisville, the Irish are on the verge of something truly special.
Mike Brey has been head coach for fifteen years and this is his most exciting squad. How’s that for objective, data-driven writing? Well, if you want that sort of stuff, read Moons’ piece from Monday. Actually, here’s some data to mull over:
If you don’t watch Jerian Grant this season, there’s a great chance you’ll be able to do during the 378 games of next year’s NBA season. A 6’5″ guard, Grant is averaging 16.7 points-per-game on a touch over thirty-five minutes per game following a season lost to academic suspension. He moves well without the ball, distributes it to the tune of 6.4 assists per game, and has a vertical explosiveness that I haven’t seen since, well, since this:
Brey’s boys are a remarkably balanced squad. The second-, third-, and fourth-highest scorers (Pat Connaughton, Zach Auguste, Demetrius Jackson) average 13.8, 13.7, and 13.6 points-per-game. Throw in sophomore guard Steve Vasturia, 8.7 points-per-game, and sixth-man V.J. Beachem, 8.5, and you have a rotation responsible for the twelfth-highest points-per-game average nationally with 81.7. The Irish are second in the country with a field goal percentage of 52.8. Only the nation’s third-ranked team, Virginia, can be said to have stifled the Irish offense, holding them to 56 in the team’s second loss of the season.
While the balanced scoring attack is deserving of ACC-olades (sorry, I couldn’t resist), the defense has been, well, HOLY COW DID YOU SEE THAT DUNK?!? Without a true center in the starting rotation, Auguste is 6’10”, the Irish give up a scad of points, but make up for it on the other end of the court. They’ve cracked eighty points twelve times, ninety points six times and one hundred points once, against Coppin State back on November 19. The Irish are perfect in overtime, with an enormous, attention-grabbing win over Michigan State back on December 3, and a tough, double-OT win against Georgia Tech.
If the knock against Brey’s teams is that they cannot win on the big stage, the case for his 2015 team being different began with that win over Michigan State and took an enormous step forward with a 71-70 win at North Carolina on January 5. That the game was essentially an athletic memorial service for the late Stuart Scott, a Tar Heel alum, so the Irish can clearly win under the brightest of lights and in the most hostile of environments. Games against Duke will either advance or take away from this theory.
But, ultimately, college basketball comes down to the tournaments and Notre Dame’s conference tournament (does that have a ring to it?) could see rematches against Virginia, or Duke, or North Carolina. If the Irish survive down the stretch and come out of that tourney alive, March Madness could see Dunks DuLac dancing in Indy. In April.
Author’s note: this article’s Featured Image is a screen “snip” from Watch ND’s hype video of Jerian Grant’s duke against Georgia Tech, featured above.
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- Why Nobody Will Cotton to Notre Dame - December 3, 2018
- Irish Finish Regular Season Perfect 12-0 - November 26, 2018