Louisville basketball has a unique opportunity down ACC stretch

Louisville basketball has a prime opportunity to rack up a lot of wins thanks to their schedule. Can the Cards sustain a long winning streak?

Don’t look now but Chris Mack and the Louisville basketball program are starting to heat up, winning four in a row including their upset of Duke on Saturday at Cameron Indoor Stadium.

With a few weeks under their belt in ACC play, Louisville currently sits at 6-1 in the conference with an overall record of 15-3 which is good enough to be ranked no. 6 in this week’s AP Top 25 polls.

In a college basketball landscape that features teams in the top 10 losing left and right, Louisville has quietly become one of the hottest teams in the nation and once again a legitimate contender for a Final Four run.

The narrative on Louisville quickly changed following back-to-back losses to Kentucky and Florida State, both games on the road I might add, as college basketball pundits began to question the effort of the Cards as well as their contention legitimacy due to a lack of guard play and a second alpha dog.

Folks even wondered aloud if Jordan Nwora could provide the scoring on a night-by-night basis to keep Louisville afloat while the other areas of the game struggled. Chris Mack acknowledged that his team had work to figure out, especially “between the ears” when it came to blowing leads and players not giving it their all for a full 40 minutes.

Louisville struggled at times but got it done against Miami, in what was their final home game for a stretch of two weeks. Then came Notre Dame at the Joyce Center, which was a tough battle all the way until the final possession, but ultimately ended with a Louisville victory. Next was Pittsburgh, a scrappy team who beat the Cards in the Peterson Events Center last season in Jeff Capel’s first season. Stopping Xavier Johnson and Trey McGowens prooved tricky as it took overtime to get the job done, but once again another road victory pushed the Cards forward.

Finally came Duke. Louisville desperately needed a top-tier victory against one of the nation’s top teams if they were going to push themselves back into the conversation for the Final Four rather than following the Ohio State and Maryland paths to irrelevancy after starting the season with contention hopes.

Chris Mack brought a near-perfect game plan into Cameron and Louisville quickly was able to pull ahead due to strong play from a surprising freshman, David Johnson. Duke was able to get back into it (thanks to another blown lead) but the road victories that Louisville so desperately fought for showed their true value as Louisville pulled off a huge victory against the no. 3 ranked team.

With just a little over a month and a half left in the 2019-20 season, Louisville now takes a four-game winning streak into a very manageable stretch of games that could push the Cards to the top of the ACC and the national rankings.

Louisville’s next ten games include just two matchups with teams ranked within the top 50 of the KenPom rankings, including North Carolina State (away) and Virginia (home).  While six of those will be against opponents ranked 80th or higher, including two with opponents ranked 107 and 178 respectively. Both North Carolina State and Virginia will provide challenges to Louisville, as could Syracuse on a hot shooting night, but none of those three teams are what we’re used to seeing in years past.

Chris Mack’s program is likely to be favored in every game starting tomorrow night on the road against Georgia Tech all the way up until North Carolina on February 22nd, which means that a 14 game winning streak could be a very real possibility. No one wants to look to far ahead but when you consider what the ACC has looked like in years past, it’s crazy to believe that a long winning streak is actually attainable and should be the expectation.

The biggest knocks on Louisville this season has been their lack of continued focus for 40 minutes and their guard play, which may make many reading this hesitant to believe that a sustained winning streak could be a possibility heading down the stretch of conference play. But considering what we saw against Duke both of those have been shown to be squashed.

Louisville’s depth is rounding into form with freshmen Samuell Williamson and the aforementioned Johnson becoming members of the rotation and giving the Cards a heightened ceiling down the stretch with their potential. Malik Williams has bounced back from injury to give Louisville a true defensive-minded big and athletic force on the offensive end. Fresh Kimble and Darius Perry have provided leadership and toughness at every corner with constant improvement. While Dwayne Sutton and Steven Enoch have provided everything we thought they could. The ingredients needed for Louisville to “get hot at the right time” are there and ready.

Can team 106 sustain it? That’s the question that remains to be answered but when we’re talking about Louisville entering the much-anticipated matchup against Florida State on February 24th, we could be looking at a Cardinal team sitting with as few as one conference loss.

It’ll take a mental toughness that’s unbreakable by tough circumstances or bad shooting nights, something we haven’t seen long-term from this team, but my guess is with Mack at the helm they’ll figure it out.