ACC Players Taken In The Last Two NBA Drafts

Those who make their living evaluating basketball players’ talents and skills presumably have some idea of what they’re talking about. (Most of them, anyway.) That expertise would seem a prerequisite among NBA decision-makers, which is why former players who learned the game at Duke under Mike Krzyzewski (Elton Brand, Trajan Langdon, Mike Dunleavy Jr., Billy King, Danny Ferry) and at North Carolina under Dean Smith (Mitch Kupchak, Michael Jordan, Donnie Walsh) found jobs as NBA general managers.

That grounding presumably comes into play when selecting players for NBA franchises. The league runs America’s most famous professional sports draft, with only two rounds per year since ’89. Only first rounders receive a guaranteed place and payment, although second round picks increasingly are rewarded with starting contracts.

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Plenty of promising players sift down to the second round, notably Duke all-pro Carlos Boozer (2002). Since 2020 Duke alone supplied the NBA with burgeoning second-round stalwarts Vernon Carey Jr., Tre Jones, and Kyle Filipowski.

This past June 12 ACC players were among the 60 draftees. That’s 20 percent of the total. The previous June it was only eight of 60 (13.3 percent).

Over the past two seasons — or since the ACC did its institutional boa constrictor routine, swallowing three more programs to push its membership to 18 – 16.7 percent of the NBA draftees (20 of 120) came from the conference.

Across that 2-year span, Duke supplied 8 of 20 ACC draftees, or 40 percent.

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Included among the NBA’s recent ACC-certified talents were four top-10 picks from Duke: Cameron Boozer (No. 3 in 2026) and Cooper Flagg (#1), Kon Knueppel (#4), and Khaman Maluach (#10) in 2025. Since Jon Scheyer took over in 2022 the Blue Devils saw 7 players taken in the opening round.

Otherwise the most highly coveted talents from the ACC were widely distributed.

Second-most No.1s from the ACC over the past two years was UNC with two. Caleb Wilson went fourth in 2026 and forgettable Drake Powell was the 22nd pick in ’25. (One possible factor in Hubert Davis’ firing was his ill-advised judgment in having…

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Publish date : 2026-09-18 10:58:00

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