Teams:

Boston College
Clemson
Duke
Florida State
Georgia Tech
Miami
Maryland
North Carolinia
N.C. State
Wake Forest

BOSTON COLLEGE
COACH: Steve Donahue LAST SEASON: 9-22, 4-12
STARTERS RETURNING:  Ryan Anderson, Lonnie Jackson, Dennis Clifford
STARTERS LOST: Matt Humphrey, Jordan Daniels
STEVE DONAHUE ON BC’S YOUTH: “If this was 15 years ago, to think you could still play with all freshmen and sophomores and compete in the ACC, I think that’s unrealistic. College basketball is a lot different now. By February, we should be a really good basketball team. Is that good enough to beat these teams? I’m not sure. I feel we’re going to be extremely competitive for 40 minutes, where last year there [were] cases where there was no way we’d be competitive for 40 minutes.”
DENNIS CLIFFORD ON THE OFFENSE: “Last year for the most part we tried to slow the game down. Our guys weren’t used to the pace of the game. This year we’re more focused on pushing the ball, getting some more points up on the board.”


CLEMSON
COACH: Brad Brownell LAST SEASON: 16-15, 8-8
STARTERS RETURNING: Devin Booker, Milton Jennings STARTERS LOST: Andre Young, Tanner Smith, Bryan Narcisse
BRAD BROWNELL ON DEVIN BOOKER AND MILTON JENNINGS: “We do have two grown men coming back. We have two guys that are seniors inside. They’re not going to be in awe of the situations we’re in or who they’re playing against; my other guys might be a little bit. But physically, we should be competitive that way.”
BROWNELL ON HIS BACKCOURT: “You’d like to have one guy on the perimeter that you felt like, ‘That guy’s got tremendous big-game experience,’ and we don’t really have that now. They’ve got to go from being guys that came in and spot-played to they’ve got to make big shots, they’ve got to run our team, they’ve got to match up against some of the best wings and guards in our league and they’ve got to hold their own.”


DUKE
COACH: Mike Krzyzewski LAST SEASON: 27-7, 13-3; lost in NCAA round of 64
STARTERS RETURNING: Tyler Thornton, Mason Plumlee, Ryan Kelly, Seth Curry STARTER LOST: Austin Rivers
MIKE KRZYZEWSKI ON COACHING IN OLYMPICS: “It was like having your oil changed. I ran out of oil in the first game of the NCAA tournament and needed to be rejuvenated again. So it couldn’t have come at a better time. You learn a lot from being with the national team. You’ll see with our team this year some things offensively that we do that we defended this summer in London. There’s so many good concepts the international community uses.”
MASON PLUMLEE ON THE DEFENSE: “We have to be better defensively. Last season, statistically we were one of the worst defensive teams Duke’s had in a long time. When we needed to lock in and get a stop in the [NCAA] tournament [against Lehigh], a guy like C.J. McCollum, we couldn’t stop him. The games we were able to win, we just outscored people.”

FLORIDA STATE
COACH: Leonard Hamilton LAST SEASON: 25-10, 12-4; ACC champion; lost in NCAA round of 32
STARTER RETURNING: Michael Snaer STARTERS LOST: Bernard James, Luke Loucks, Deividas Dulkys, Xavier Gibson
MICHAEL SNAER ON THE OFFENSE: “Some of our young guys, when they attack the rim, you might as well just get out of the way because you’re going to get dunked on. We’ve got some young, tough, athletic guys. That’s going to be the biggest attribute to our offense.”
LEONARD HAMILTON ON THE TEAM: “No one expects us to come back this year and compete for the title again. We lost six seniors. [But] we think we can match that. We’re not in this [North Carolina] region, so you know very little about the guys that we’ve signed because they’re not necessarily all the McDonald’s All-Americans. But if you look back at the history of our team, most of our guys have been that way. We’ll be similar to the way we’ve been in the past. We have planned for this year, knowing we would be losing six seniors.”

GEORGIA TECH
COACH: Brian Gregory LAST SEASON: 11-20, 4-12
STARTERS RETURNING: Mfon Udofia, Daniel Miller, Jason Morris, Brandon Reed, Kammeon Holsey
STARTERS LOST: none
BRIAN GREGORY ON THE OFFENSE: “We’re going to be better offensively. We need to shoot better from the field, and the most important thing is we need to do a better job of taking care of the ball. We had too many empty possessions. So even if we shoot the same percentage but cut our turnovers by four a game, that’s going to give us five to six more points in a game.”
GREGORY ON THE TEAM: “We’re going to need more scoring out of the post players. And you hope [guards] Brandon Reed and Jason Morris now as juniors increase their ability to score from the perimeter. And those young kids, the freshmen on the perimeter, [Chris] Bolden and [Marcus] Georges-Hunt, do a good job of injecting a little more offensive firepower.”


MIAMI
COACH: Jim Larranaga LAST SEASON: 20-13, 9-7, lost in NIT second round
STARTERS RETURNING: Shane Larkin, Durand Scott, Kenny Kadji, Reggie Johnson STARTER LOST: Malcolm Grant
JIM LARRANAGA ON THE TEAM: “Last year we could’ve had an even better season; we just had so many health issues. The players overcame a lot of challenges — we won at Duke, we beat Florida State. We took some very positive steps. We’ve just got the foundation in. We’re not anywhere near where I’d like to be.”
REGGIE JOHNSON ON AN NCAA BID: “I’m not going to say it’s going to be easy as far as us making the tournament, but I feel like if we come together we’ve got a heck of a team. And I mean that with a passion. I’m getting chills right now thinking about it because we’re going to be scary good as long as we come to work. Every position we have, we’re deep. Practice is a war.”


MARYLAND
COACH: Mark Turgeon LAST SEASON: 17-15, 6-10
STARTERS RETURNING: Nick Faust, James Padgett STARTERS LOST: Terrell Stoglin, Sean Mosley, Ashton Pankey
MARK TURGEON ON FRESHMAN POST PLAYER SHAQUILLE CLEARE: “He’ll live up to the hype rebounding. He’s a very good rebounder. My biggest concern now is that he’s just so physical, we’ve got to tone him back a little bit so he can play more than five minutes a game and not foul out. He loves contact. There will be games where he has a double-double this year.”
TURGEON ON ALBANY TRANSFER LOGAN ARONHALT: “Logan’s going to help us. He has great experience. When you score 1,100 points, I don’t care where you are, you can score the ball. He can flat-out shoot it. Right away he’s one of our best shooters so you’ve got to guard him, which opens up things for our big guys and opens up penetration for Nick [Faust]. You can’t just let Logan stand there and shoot it — he’s going to make it.”

NORTH CAROLINA
COACH: Roy Williams LAST SEASON: 32-6, 14-2, lost in NCAA Elite Eight
STARTER RETURNING: Reggie Bullock STARTERS LOST: Harrison Barnes, Tyler Zeller, John Henson, Kendall Marshall
ROY WILLIAMS ON FRESHMAN POINT GUARD MARCUS PAIGE: “He has a tremendous understanding of the point guard position. He’s been a point guard since the first day he played basketball. Our players have a great deal of respect for him. I have a great deal of respect for him. But it’s a very, very difficult position and a very difficult task he’s trying to do.”
FORWARD JAMES MICHAEL MCADOO ON UNC NOT BEING THE FAVORITE IN THE ACC: “People are just going off the sole fact that we lost four guys to the NBA. But we have a great team. People have really been selling us short, but we’re not worried about any of the preseason rankings or preseason accolades that other teams might be getting over us. At the end of the day, we’re North Carolina basketball. Coach Roy’s going to put five guys on the court that are going to compete for that title.”

N.C. STATE WOLFPACK
COACH: Mark Gottfried LAST SEASON: 24-13, 9-7; lost in NCAA Sweet 16
STARTERS RETURNING: Richard Howell, Lorenzo Brown, C.J. Leslie, Scott Wood STARTERS LOST: C.J. Williams
RICHARD HOWELL ON BEING PICKED NO.1 IN THE ACC POLL: " We have to keep our heads on straight. We can't feed into being picked preseason No.1. A lot of hype comes with being picked; we haven't proven anything yet. Everyone is going off what we did last year. That's good and all, but we want to actually be No.1 [at the end]."
MARK GOTTFRIED ON THE PLAYERS WHO MUST BE REPLACED: "When you look at the consistent play of Alex [Johnson] and C.J. [Williams] and DeShawn Painter for our tem, there was a reliability, a dependability that group had that made our team work. We lost that veteran consistency. That's what we've got to replace."

WAKE FOREST
COACH: Jeff Bzdelik LAST SEASON: 13-18, 4-12
STARTERS RETURNING: C.J. Harris, Travis McKie
STARTERS LOST: Tony Chennault, Nikita Mescheriakov, Carson Desrosiers
TRAVIS MCKIE ON THE IMPROVED DEPTH: “Depth is something a lot of people might not see as important, but for a team it’s very important. That depth is going to go a long way for us. We have more players. It’s much easier [for a foe] to guard a team with seven players when you know all seven than 12. The scoring might be a little bit more balanced than it was last year.”
JEFF BZDELIK ON THREE OF HIS FRESHMEN: “We have three of them that have atypical freshmen bodies in terms of their physicality. Devin Thomas is a shade under 6-9, but he’s a legit 235, 238. He’s strong from the waist down; he can leverage and hold position because of that. Arnaud Adala Moto from Cameroon reminds you when you see him of Larry Johnson. He’s really strong. And Cody Miller-McIntyre benches 315 pounds.”

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