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College Basketball 2021-2022



Expect JBrake and Walker Kessler next, proving ACC players the best
 
Seton Hall loading up in the transfer portal with two big pick-ups from Syracuse and South Florida.
 
Seems premature and irrational to make such a judgement. Probably 15 to 20 other schools in the country become overwhelming massive title favorites with Zion. If just one of RJ or Reddish live up to their billing we walk to a title. 2018, 2019 enjoyed a lot of success and were title contenders, I’m not going to use the binary of them making a title or FF to disqualify them. 2022 looks like it can fit that mold too. And those results are skewed from K’s decline as a coaching talent anyways

OAD for top 5, can’t miss players is fine. The OAD Steward/Duval level players are the only ones who need to be avoided.
 
I think the bigger problem is it’s seemingly impossible for K and his staff to differentiate between can’t miss, immediately positive stars versus negative or zero-value OADs. Everyone in the world except for one very, very special Duke fan would’ve taken Barrett over Zion to lead a team to a title in their freshman year. It turned out Zion with 40% usage and someone like a sophomore Buddy Boeheim or senior Tyler Thornton as his sidekick would’ve been much more likely to win a title.

Bagley, Okafor, Parker, Reddish, Rivers... all were viewed as can’t miss prospects who would be immediately positive stars as freshmen. You could even throw someone like Duval into that group—plenty of reputable scouts had Duval as an elite prospect. These guys were all projected OAD lottery picks out of HS, and they ended up being lottery picks. For their one year at Duke, they turned out to range from massively negative overall (Reddish) to close to net zero players due to terrible defense (Bagley, Parker) or warping the offense too much around them (Okafor, Rivers). Even Tatum wasn’t amazing as a freshman, and he was like a top 10% outcome for an OAD in college performance.

K’s approach to roster construction since striking gold in 2015 has frankly been inexplicable and disgusting. You have to be able to do one of these things at a high level if you want to succeed in this era:

1. Evaluate OAD talent to separate the true can’t miss guys from the ones who will be lazy on defense, toxic on offense or simply not that good overall. Don’t rely on recruiting services by just picking the top ranked recruits. Pick the OADs who you believe will be immediately positive players in your system, with the offense and defense you know you can run well.

2. Develop non-OAD-caliber prospects to either lead your program or at least complement the OADs. This has been discussed, and I think the clear consensus is K has been a disaster in player development for a while now.

3. Quickly teach OADs who don’t come in as immediately great overall players, or adjust your system to hide their weaknesses. This is a combination of impossible and never going to happen under K. When he actually does adjust, it happens with very little of the season left to play (e.g., 2018 zone and 2021 Mark). This isn’t going to change, and any successor from his coaching tree is likely to take the same approach—run your system into the ground, until it becomes more than 100% clear that it will not work with these players, then make a massive change that your players only have a few games to adjust to.

K and his staff (and any other program) have needed to do just 1 of those 3 core competencies well in order to have an elite team and/or make a Final Four. Doing 2 or 3 of those things well would produce a heavy favorite. They have consistently done 0 since 2015.

Proper OAD evaluation coming out of HS (competency #1 above) seems extremely difficult to me, and not really K’s fault when he misses over half the time on “can’t miss” players, which would make me lean toward taking a more “Villanova” approach to building a team. But then the problem becomes K’s inability or unwillingness to even make a good faith effort at accomplishing #2 or #3 above. The result is, ultimately and sadly, Duke’s best chance at a title being to do exactly what K has been doing: take a near-blind shotgun approach where we get 3-5 OADs every season, regardless of how well they would fit the roster or system, and just hope they turn out incredibly well, like in 2015.
 
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To me the other piece is that we've been really shitty with getting 2-3 quality years out of guys in the 25-60 sweet spot. I really think part of it is the program ethos of recruiting with the pitch of getting guys to the NBA ASAP. If we're gonna take guys in that range, can we at least take the guys that are not hellbent on leaving after one year.

There's nobody in that range that WOULDN'T leave if their stock blows up, and that's all well and good and completely understood, sometimes unforeseeable (Kennard in year 2 is an example of this). But the Cassius Stanleys and DJ Stewards of the world just aren't great value. Looking back on it, there's almost no way that Steward wasn't a OAD in his head from the beginning. Nobody in their right mind, if they were truly on the fence about staying more than a year coming into school, would start the year out in the 20's and 30's in mocks, basically drop out of all reputable 1st and 2nd round projections, and decide that the outcome of their freshman year should push them toward leaving. He knew he was gone from Day 1. With Cassius, I don't care that he had a better year than Ellis because the process was shitty. He was like a 21 year old freshman or whatever with great measurables and we must have known it was absolutely a 1 year thing.

Since we went to OAD, we've been especially horrid at getting value (meaning a good combo of years + high quality play) out of guards in this range. Like, Grayson and who else?
 
@StopThePumpFakesShav I agree that we haven't had the returns that a program might expect from those 25-60 guys, but in more than one way.
1. They bolt after mediocre seasons a la DJ.
2. They transfer because they are being recruited over/not playing a la Brake, Gbinijie, Semi, AOC
3. They don't develop because K doesn't do development a la Baker, Javin

At some point, I think most of the guys who leave early don't have much of a choice. It's a cannibalistic program at this point, IMO.
 
I was once again writing something and realized Farmer posted the same thing above. Yeah, 25-60 isn't a sweet spot anymore. The sweet spot for multi-year players is below 50. Not just at Duke, but everywhere, and especially at Duke.

Times are changing quickly, and you want a head coach who is extremely flexible and adaptable right now. Fortunately, we have the Master to show us the way in the twilight of his career, which is the time many legends in all fields become the most flexible and adaptable.

There are much worse programs to be a fan of for the next few years, since 99% of the programs out there don't even have the OAD shotgun option that K will be using. At least Duke will have a non-negligible chance to win a title each season. It will be merely a chance, though--random, unpredictable chance based on nothing more than whether the recruiting services nailed it or not.
 
If he/they can play it properly, the transfer rule change will be an even bigger boon to the blue bloods than the OAD funnel. Duke. UK, UNC, etc. should immediately have the inside track on players who have real, college-vetted measurables. What it will take, though, is an aggressive attitude - probably bordering on tampering like UNC and Cam Johnson - towards warming up potential transfers, and a thorough knowledge of what analytic gaps need to be filled. I imagine K is too arrogant at this point to bother to do either.

Ideally, you'd take a chance on 1-2 hyper skilled/athletic OADs, 2-3 50ish ranked types, and have someone's ear to the ground - shit, hire Quinn for 500k/year under the table - for a few key high-level movers in areas that are always a need (and you can never have enough of) like shooting, good A/TO pgs, rim protection, etc. When players are also able to be paid based on their likeness, the Duke brand should be able to ensure that we get to select the players we want from the three categories. Only a dotard could fuck that up.
 
I think @StopThePumpFakesShav hit the nail on the head. It's the ethos of our program that's created this situation with recruits in the 25-60 range. We've become a known OAD factory. It's self-perpetuating. Players are choosing Duke because they want to be OAD. And once there, they must feel like a failure if they're not OAD.

While it's probably become harder for anyone to get value out of a 25-60 player, I think it's become especially hard for Duke and UK. Because of our culture, the type of 25-60 recruits we're landing are ones with an unrealistic view of their own talent.
 
Unfortunately for Duke, the "sweet spot" is now top 10. And like SMTTEM said, it's a gamble.

But if the 25-60 players we're landing expect to be OAD, and if we're not going to develop players outside the top 60, we're stuck with trying to land multiple top 10 players and hoping that 2-3 of our players outside the top 10 happen to be good right away or want to stick around.
 
This seems obvious, but do we not just... talk to recruits about their NBA goals and priorities?

Like, if we're recruiting someone like Steward, do we just avoid the subject of whether he'd expect to leave after a year to be a second round pick? Seems like there should be very direct conversations about that, and they should be one of the most important factors in prioritizing non-top 10 targets.
 
I agree with all that, and I think that the "multiple top 10 players" route is generally crappy at least half the time. In high school class of 2020, there were a lot of Top 10 players that have fine potential for future success but were not actually that good now (Brandon Boston, Jalen Johnson, Greg Brown, Terence Clarke, etc.).

Irrespective of rankings, its empirically true enough that teams that rely heavily on multiple freshmen don't win a lot of the big things. The goal should be to find a way to consistently fields teams that have, let's say, at least 4 non-freshmen in the Top 6, or something. Then you have to look at how to achieve that goal, and that landscape may be shifting year by year, but it seems right now that paying attention to the transfer portal make sense.
 
Also on the issue of 25-60 not being a sweet spot anymore -- it still looks like there's relatively little player mobility among the 40-60-ranked guys.

Just eyeballing the past year, it seems like Top 20 were most likely to go pro, 20-40 or so had a lot of transfers and a few guys declaring, and the next 20 was maybe more static (but also more guys I hadn't really heard of, so I could just be misinformed).
 
@Pantone287 I'm not sure the "what if you fail" conversation is one that's easy to have with recruits and still get them to come to your school. You're either suggesting you don't have faith in them to play well enough to be a high draft pick or you don't have faith in your staff to make them that. That's not actually what you would be saying, but it could easily come across that way.

I gather that a lot of recruiting is essentially blowing smoke up recruits' asses.
 
The staff sold Wendell Moore on being OAD, for example. I suspect that part of the reason they're landing so many elite classes is they're making the OAD pitch even when it's not warranted. So they reap what they sow in many cases.

They were lucky with Moore that he either really enjoys campus life or has a realistic perception of his own abilities. Or maybe they were unlucky, if you think that Moore playing major minutes next year is a bad thing.
 
Moore is a test case for Duke fans, too. Here's a multiyear player who seems like he's unpacked his bags, even if that wasn't his original goal. He improved at almost everything as a soph, most notably raising his 3pt percentage 9 points (on much increased volume), but also upping his A/TO rate and his already good FT shooting.

At 9.7 ppg, he ties freshman Hurt for the highest scoring average by a returning player since Grayson came back for his senior year.

That said, he was still 42/30/84, so his shooting overall is a weakness (probably better over the second half of the season or so, but I'm not sure).
 
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