Those who make their living evaluating basketball players’ talents and skills presumably have some idea of what they’re talking about. (Most of them, anyway.) That expertise would seem a prerequisite among NBA decision-makers, which is why former players who learned the game at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski (Elton Brand, Trajan Langdon, Mike Dunleavy Jr., Billy King, Danny Ferry) and at North Carolina under Dean Smith (Mitch Kupchak, Michael Jordan, Donnie Walsh) found jobs as NBA general managers.
Those who make their living evaluating basketball players’ talents and skills presumably have some idea of what they’re talking about. (Most of them, anyway.) That expertise would seem a prerequisite among NBA decision-makers, which is why former players who learned the game at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski (Elton Brand, Trajan Langdon, Mike Dunleavy Jr., Billy King, Danny Ferry) and at North Carolina under Dean Smith (Mitch Kupchak, Michael Jordan, Donnie Walsh) found jobs as NBA general managers.
That grounding presumably comes into play when selecting players for NBA franchises. The league runs America’s most famous professional sports draft, with only two rounds per year since ‘89. Only first rounders receive a guaranteed place and payment, although second round picks increasingly are rewarded with starting contracts.
Plenty of promising players sift down to the second round, notably Duke all-pro Carlos Boozer (2002). Since 2020 Duke alone supplied the NBA with burgeoning second-round stalwarts Vernon Carey Jr., Tre Jones, and Kyle Filipowski. This past June 12 ACC players were among the 60 draftees. That’s 20 percent of the total. The previous June it was only eight of 60 (13.3 percent).
Over the past two seasons — or since the ACC did its institutional boa constrictor routine, swallowing three more programs to push its membership to 18 – 16.7 percent of the NBA draftees (20 of 120) came from the conference.
Across that 2-year span, Duke supplied 8 of 20 ACC draftees, or 40 percent.
Included among the NBA’s recent ACC-certified talents were four top-10 picks from Duke: Cameron Boozer (No. 3 in 2026) and Cooper Flagg (#1), Kon Knueppel (#4), and Khaman Maluach (#10) in 2025. Since Jon Scheyer took over in 2022 the Blue Devils saw 7 players taken in the opening round.Otherwise the most highly coveted talents from the ACC were widely distributed.
Second-most No.1s from the ACC over the past two years was UNC with two. Caleb Wilson went fourth in 2026 and forgettable Drake Powell was the 22nd pick in ’25. (One possible factor in Hubert Davis’ firing was his ill-advised judgment in having an injured Wilson participate in a practice, breaking his right thumb as he recovered from fracturing his left hand.)
Rebuilt Louisville supplied the No. 6 pick in 2026 in oft-injured guard Mikel Brown Jr. The other ’26 ACC first-round selection, the league’s eighth in the last two drafts, was Ebuka Okorie. That he attended Stanford may surprise some people. Yet coach Kyle Smith has quietly built talented units in fielding consecutive 20-win teams since joining the ACC.
In fact, only six league squads won 20 or more games in each of the past two seasons: Clemson, Duke, Louisville, North Carolina, SMU, and Stanford.
Big man Maxime Raynaud, the Cardinal’s 2025 star and the runnerup in ACC Player of the Year voting to Flagg (76 to 4), went to Sacramento in the second round, signed a 3-year, $5.95 million contract, and started 56 times as a Kings rookie in 2025-26.
One difficulty in gaining notice as a Cardinal is Stanford’s modest home court excitement, reflected in the worst attendance in the ACC last year at 3,899 fans per game. Good news: that was up from an average of 2,951 attendees at Maples Pavilion in 2025, the school’s inaugural ACC season. Capacity is 7,233. Maybe Stanford fans have yet to be as impressed as we are with their team’s addition to the North Carolina-based league.
