Friday’s ACC Player Movement News

It’s really been a challenge to come up with the right term for the overlap when you get both recruiting and portal movement at the same time, so until we come up with something better, we’re going to go with ACC Player Movement News, which is an improvement over ACC Portal And Player Movement News.

And speaking of such, there were two significant developments Thursday: first, Syracuse landed a quality player when 4-star Donnie Freeman committed to the ‘Cuse, and second, UNC’s D’Marco Dunn slipped in to the portal just under the wire.

For UNC, it’s the seventh transfer, which is pretty wild. He joins Puff Johnson (Penn State), Will Shaver (UAB), classmate Dontrez Styles (Georgetown), Caleb Love (Michigan), Justin McKoy (Hawaii) and Tyler Nickel (Virginia Tech). So far, the Heels have just four transfers in: Harrison Ingram from Stanford, Cormac Ryan (Notre Dame), Jae’Lyn Withers (Louisville) and Paxson Wojcik (Brown).

As for Freeman, the newest Syracuse recruit is 6-9 and he sees Syracuse as his “dream school.”

He’s a Top 35 player and a big get for new coach Adrian Autry. Freeman joins Elijah Moore and William Patterson in Autry’s first class. Toss in JJ Starling and Autry has a pretty good base to start with.

Will he stick with the 2-3 though?

Well he might: Syracuse is apparently after former Seminole 7-4 Naheem McLeod who would have probably slotted in well in Jim Boeheim’s system. He’s not gifted offensively, but he could jam up the middle reasonably well. Toss in Patterson and suddenly scoring on the Orange might not be so easy.

It’s really too early to know much, but from a distance it sure seems like Syracuse has gotten a jolt of energy from Autry and his staff.

And Georgia Tech has lost Jalon Moore to the portal. He could probably still come back but who knows how well he would fit into new coach Damon Stoudamire’s system?

Finally, we don’t think we mentioned it but NC State lost Isaiah Miranda to the portal. He redshirted this year so you may not know much about him.