Louisville Basketball: Ranking The Cards' 5 Best Wins Of The Year

After another great win over Duke, we take a look at Louisville basketball’s five best wins of the 2016-2017 college basketball season.

The Louisville basketball team was able to beat Duke on Saturday, which just added to the long list of good opponents the Cardinals have beaten in the 2016-2017 season. However, what have beens the Cards’ best five wins of the season?

There are many different reasons and arguments for these teams, but we chose a specific five based on the RPI rankings.

With that being said, let’s take a look at Louisville’s five best wins of the season:

5. Pittsburgh Panthers

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This again, was the Quentin Snider show in the KFC Yum Center earlier this week. Snider finished the game tying his season-high with 22 points and helped the Cards get back to .500 in conference play after starting 0-2.

Louisville was destroying the Panthers for most of the game, but the Panthers were able to cut the Cards’ lead to five, mostly thanks to Jamel Artis’ 43 points.

The biggest concern after this game was that Louisville was up 47-26 at halftime, but couldn’t quite hang on to that huge lead. Louisville just turned the basketball over way too many times, as six different Cards had at least two turnovers in this game.

With that being said, we’ll take a win no matter how it comes about.

4. Indiana Hoosiers

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Not only is this still one of the Cards’ best “road-wins” of the season, it was extremely important since Louisville has just gotten destroyed by Virginia earlier in the week. Not to mention, Rick Pitino made a few lineup changes, which propelled Donovan Mitchell into having one of his best of the entire season.

While Indiana was ranked number 16 at that time, the Hoosiers are very far from where they were at the beginning of the season. They have now lost four out of their last five games, losing to Louisville, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Maryland over that stretch.

With that being said, the Hoosiers have had their struggles, but they have also been able to knock of Kansas and North Carolina this season.

They are very tough team to figure out, but this is still one of Louisville’s best “road wins” of the season. We all know how many of those fans were Hoosiers in Bankers Life Arena that Saturday afternoon.

3. Purdue Boilermakers

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This was the Cardinals’ first win over a ranked team in the 2016-2017 season and they played very well against a very large Purdue basketball team, not to mention this win gave the Cardinals their sixth win of the season.

If you go back and look at the box score for this game, it’s pretty impressive to see how far this team has come in a month.

There were only two Cards that scored double-digits against the Boilermakers and it wasn’t Quentin Snider and Donovan Mitchell. It was actually Mangok Mathiang and Ray Spalding that ended up giving Purdue all they could handle.

2. Duke Blue Devils

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Hopefully this won’t end up being the Cards’ biggest conference win of the season, but it surely is at this point in the year. Duke was coming into this game already getting beat by Florida State earlier in the week and the Cards handed the Blue Devils their second straight loss.

It was just so impressive to see how well Louisville played against Duke, especially since the Cards were in control for most of the basketball game. There were moments when the Blue Devils were climbing back into the game, but ultimately Louisville was the better team on Saturday.

Losing two games in-a-row is definitely going to drop the Blue Devils out of the top ten this week and maybe even outside of the top fifteen for a week or so. However, that still doesn’t change the fact that this is currently Louisville’s best conference win of the season.

1. Kentucky Wildcats

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There are numerous reasons why this is still Louisville’s best win of the season and even more for why it will remain that way all year. Obviously, every single win in the NCAA Tournament will be bigger than this win, but I doubt Louisville will play a team that is better than Kentucky this season.

In case you forgot, it was Quentin Snider who had a season-high 22 points that ultimately was the difference between these two rivals.

Kentucky is currently the sixth ranked team in the country and they may not lose for the rest of the regular season, especially if they can find a way to beat Kansas in a few weeks.