The preseason ACC player of the year could be a transfer who has yet to play an ACC game. It could be a freshman. It could be the shortest player in the league. It could be the sole returning player who appeared on the first or second all-ACC teams in the past abbreviated season.
It could be just about anyone when the votes are unveiled Wednesday, because there isn't a clear front-runner. Or even front-runners. Such is the state of the ACC, which in many ways is heading into another season of the unknown.
It's a preseason improvement on last season, when the revolving door of talent spun so quickly that not a single player from the previous first or second team returned. At least there's one this time around, but the ACC is still in a position where the jerseys might as well say "one size fits all."
In addition to UNC forward Garrison Brooks, a second-team pick a year ago, there are also three third-team all-ACC players back, although it's hard to imagine Virginia's Kihei Clark, Georgia Tech's Jose Alvarado or Clemson's Aamir Simms getting too much consideration for player of the year.
But Brooks certainly will, and his main competition will be Virginia forward Sam Hauser, a transfer from Marquette, 5-foot-7 Miami sparkplug Chris Lykes and perhaps even a freshman like Florida State's Scottie Barnes or Duke's Jalen Johnson.
If the talent drain from year to year was severe last season, there really isn't a word to describe it this time around. Just about everybody is starting from scratch to some degree; the teams that return the biggest chunks of their rotations — Georgia Tech, Syracuse, Clemson — aren't in the title conversation at this point. Virginia comes the closest and adds Hauser, which is why the Cavaliers will almost certainly be the No. 1 pick.
Beyond that, it really is anybody's guess.
Duke, at least, is used to starting over from year to year; Louisville and North Carolina are in the same boat in terms of the lack of minutes returning from last year. The talent is there on both rosters. It's just a question of how quickly they can get things pulled together — and under the most unusual circumstances anyone has ever seen. Meanwhile, a team like N.C. State could thrive in this environment, if it can figure out where the ball goes in crunch time now that Markell Johnson is gone.
This was always going to be an unpredictable season, even before COVID, but all bets are off now. In football, we've seen offenses ahead of defenses ahead of special teams, with inconsistency reigning above all. That could go either way in basketball.
Will the lack of continuity and disruptions to practice and routine place a premium on players who can create their own shot? Further push the game toward shooters? Put even more responsibility on point guards? Or will throttled-back practices make physicality the trump card in actual games, tilting the balance back toward the inside?
These are always questions to some degree as the game evolves over time. They just happen to be particularly acute this year in the ACC, partially because of COVID, partially because of what has become a constant ebb and flow of talent in the conference.
And this may just be the new normal in the ACC: The combination of the annual influx of one-and-done talent and increasing transfer freedom in college sports may require a mental adjustment to what has traditionally been considered a typical or even acceptable level of roster consistency.
This was going to be a strange, unpredictable ACC basketball season even outside of a pandemic. In one, all bets are off.
