As the 81st NBA campaign tipped-off this week, the ACC released its annual list of former conference players whose name's appeared on opening day rosters across the league's 30 teams, and it totals 80 players.
Seventeen of the 18 (Notre Dame) ACC teams have at least one player on an NBA roster, and that incudes the Orange program with Jerami Grant ( 2012-14) now entering his first season with the Memphis Grizzlies.
Grant, an Olympic gold medalist in 2020 with Team USA, was traded this past June to Memphis from Portland, in a deal involving former All-Star Ja Morant, and is now playing for his sixth NBA franchise over what has suddenly turned into a 13-year pro career. He scored 15 points in his Memphis debut Wednesday night, a 123-103 win over Utah.
Syracuse has never dominated NBA rosters like the Tobacco Road heritage ACC schools
Other than a tie with Kentucky, no other college program nationally has more than Duke's 26 NBA players, including three rookies this season, one of whom is ex-SU center Maliq Brown with San Antonio. North Carolina has 11 NBA players, and Virginia nine. to lead all conference schools (Florida State next with six).
Perhaps if Brown stayed at SU for four seasons he would be joining Grant as two Orange NBA players, something that last occurred just last season, when Buddy Boeheim played four games with the Oklahoma City Thunder, spending the bulk of the season with the team's G-League franchise (Oklahoma City Blue).
Boeheim, who has played 24 NBA games over parts of three different seasons with Detroit and OKC, is expected to begin this season in the G-League after signing an Exhibit 10 contract over the summer with the Thunder organization.
There was no other Orange-tinted NBA era like the early 1990s
That is the period that featured the most Syracuse players among the then-27 team league, with a big part of that representation coming off the Orangemen squads between 1988-1992. Those teams eventually produced seven NBA players, including Derrick Coleman, the only Syracuse player selected as the overall number one draft pick (Dave Bing was the second overall pick in 1966).
And think about this contrast in whre the Orange program has fallen this decade. In the1990-91 season, Duke only had five NBA players on active rosters compared to SU's four, and in December 1989, in the inaugural ACC-Big East Challenge game in Greensboro, SU beat Duke 78-76.
As the Gerry McNamara era gets underway, it will be interesting see the development of prospective future NBA players coming through the program, beginning with this season's roster.
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