Louisville basketball: 3 locks and 3 bold predictions vs. Wake Forest
By Jacob Lane
Lock: Jordan Nwora scores 20-plus points
Wake Forest has been one of the worst defensive teams across not only the ACC this season but also across the entire country, allowing teams to score 72.1 points per game, which ties for 249th best in the nation according to the NCAA’s official website. They don’t score the ball particularly well either, ranking 168th in the country in total points per game at 71.6 ppg.
I point all of that out to inform you that neither of those stats bode well for Wake Forest tonight as they’ll have to deal with one of the ACC’s top scorers in Jordan Nwora, who is coming off of a game where he didn’t score the ball particularly well.
To put it nicely, Wake Forest doesn’t have a whole lot of talent that is going to be capable of dealing with Nwora in either a one-on-one matchup or in the 2-3/man-to-man matchup zone that Danny Manning plays the majority of the time. In three of the last four games, Wake Forest has allowed at least one player from the opposing team to get hot from the three-point line, resulting in 20-plus point games for Notre Dame’s TJ Gibbs, Virginia’s Tomas Woldensae and Clemson’s Hunter Tyson.
Wake Forest shows a glaring tendency to fall asleep on closeouts after forcing team’s to swing the ball around the key against the 2-3 zone. Good ball movement and good player movement have been the recipe for getting open and having opportunities to score, and for those three players mentioned they’ve been able to take advantage.
I expect Louisville to get Nwora involved early and often due to not only his talent advantage but his three-point shooting and size getting in the paint. We’ve seen Dwayne Sutton do a great job against the zone this season of being able to distribute the ball from the top of the key, and more times than not he’s at least found Nwora for good looks.
It’ll obviously be up to Nwora to knock down his shots, but I think by games end we’ll be talking about the junior wing having another big scoring game and taking another step closer to the ACC Player of the Year award.