For the third time in less than a week, a Duke Blue Devil has entered his name into the ever-growing transfer portal. Patrick Tapé, the 6’9” graduate transfer from Columbia, will leave Durham after one season in which he failed to make an impact for a Duke team that desperately could’ve used the help up front. The news was first reported by Steve Wiseman of the Charlotte News & Observer. With his final year of eligibility still intact thanks to the NCAA waiver for all winter sports athletes, Tapé will take another bite at the apple and try to land at a school that will allow him to regain his 2018-19 form, where he averaged 11.3 points and 5.9 rebounds per game.
Patrick’s road to get to Durham was an odd one in and of itself. He sat out the entirety of the 2019-20 season at Columbia with a toe injury that seemingly shouldn’t have forced him to miss the entire year, but he chose to punt on his senior season and transfer up a level where he’d be eligible to play immediately. Tapé committed to playing his final season at Duke on March 24th, 2020, only to decommit and re-open his recruitment nine days later. Ultimately, he decided that Duke was the best fit for him after all and recommitted on April 5th, becoming the program's first-ever graduate transfer.
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| Tapé struggled to find rotation minutes in his only season in Durham. |
While Tapé was never expected to provide anything more than rotational depth in the frontcourt, it’d be hard to find a more inconsequential Duke transfer. Having played just 45 minutes on the shortened season, he was never able to carve out a consistent role in the rotation. Unfortunately for Tapé, his only career start for the Blue Devils in a win at Notre Dame was immediately followed by a back injury that put him on the shelf for a few weeks (the team as a whole also didn’t have much game action during this time either due to COVID-related cancellations). Patrick was used sparingly after returning from the injury, but he did feature in three of Duke’s final four games of the season.
The sample size was very small, but the on/off splits did in fact point towards Tapé being a positive player for Duke this year. While the offense took a hit with him on the court, Duke’s defense was almost 17 (!!) points per 100 possessions better with Tapé on the floor than off. He was one of just five players on the roster with a positive impact on defense according to on/off splits. Had he been able to stay healthy throughout the course of the season, it would’ve been interesting to see if he could’ve earned more minutes in the rotation as an impactful defensive player, or if these gaudy splits would’ve regressed towards a less impressive mean.
While the loss of Tapé won’t send shockwaves to the projected 2021-22 roster, there is still a glaring need to improve a mediocre defense that, as of today, ranked 78th nationally for the season, according to Ken Pomeroy. The loss of Goldwire is obviously far more significant, but Tapé’s departure means there are only three net positive defensive players left on the roster as it stands. If the Blue Devils are hoping to regain their stature as one of the elite teams in college basketball, they’ll have to shore up a defensive unit that could at best be described as shoddy this past season. Doing so will require both the returning players to make a sizeable leap forward, as well as the incoming freshmen to make an immediate defensive impact – something that is more rare than a team usually built around one-and-done’s would prefer.
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