There’s something a bit uncomfortable about early departing players being referred to as alumni of particular colleges. Those players apparently do fit the strict definition of an alumnus if they attended a university for any length of time, and thus can claim affiliation with an institution whether they stopped by for a semester of classes and then went pro, or stayed all four years.
Still, their shortened investment of effort and time is a bit different from most students who similarly claim status as alums after attending college for four sometimes grueling and expensive years.
So, while it’s fun to claim a tie with a star like Kyrie Irving, who played in 11 games as a Blue Devil during an injury-marred 2010-11 season, his periodically espoused views – a flat earth, Jews controlling the media, the falsity of an American astronaut walking on the moon – don’t reflect well on a Duke education. Or, rather, on what fragments of a Duke education he had. As _Rolling Stone_ headlined in a 2023 piece about his various unorthodox assertions: “Kyrie Irving, The NBA’s Conspiracy Theorist-In-Chief, Is Back On His Bullshit.”
(To be fair, at least one prominent Duke grad is also notorious for promulgating edgy views, but we won’t go there.)
Folks at Louisville might not be too thrilled either if two-year player Terry Rozier is found guilty in the emerging NBA gambling scandal.
Perhaps in this era when basketball standouts rarely stay four years at a single school, we should take pains to create separate categories for players who drop in for a season or two, whether by transfer or purposeful recruitment, and those in it for the long haul.
Maybe such differentiation would best be applied when attempting to name a program’s greatest players, whether at a particular position or overall. Christian Laettner versus Cooper Flagg? Tommy Amaker versus Trey Jones?
Differing opportunity allows for different achievements. That’s not a knock on anyone, just a fact. But lumping everyone together creates uncomfortable and sometimes misleading inequities.
An ACC press release of course went for the semantic simplicity of claiming “alumni”, the more the merrier. By the league’s measure, “seventy-six alumni from current Atlantic Coast Conference men’s basketball programs” began the 2025-26 season in the NBA. Duke by far led the way, with nearly three times as many affiliated performers (24) as North Carolina (9), its next-closest conference rival in NBA placement.
Perhaps surprisingly, Virginia had the third-most NBA representatives with seven, edging Florida State’s six. Also a bit arrestingly, once-mighty Syracuse had a single player, Jerami Grant, on an opening-day NBA roster.
Two schools, NC State and SMU, were not represented at the start of this year’s NBA competition.
**PEAK PERFORMERS**
**Former ACC Players**
**On 2025-26 NBA Rosters**
Duke
24
UNC
9
Virginia
7
FSU
6
Stanford
5
Wake
5
Louisville
3
Miami
3
Pitt
3
Cal
2
Clemson
2
Ga. Tech
2
No. Dame
2
BC
1
Syracuse
1
Va. Tech
1