Last week, I posted the first part of a series highlighting Duke’s struggles in player development since the 2015 championship team. Here’s the second part, focusing on the players who lasted three or more years in the program from the 2017 and 2018 recruiting classes:
Note: All pictures came from Ball Durham.
Alex O’Connell (2017) – #20 SG/#87 Overall (ESPN), #14 SG/#68 Overall (247 Sports)
Duke Career Stats: 101 G, 12.5 MPG, 4.3 PPG, 1.8 RPG, 0.6 APG
On paper, Alex O’Connell is the exact type of recruit that you’d want the Blue Devils to sign. He was billed as a prolific three-point shooter with athleticism and his father even played for Duke in the 1970’s. He hit just under 49% of his threes as a freshman and even briefly wrestled a starting spot away from Trevon Duval. Unfortunately, the three-point clip O’Connell posted as a freshman turned out to be an aberration. Even at the percentage he shot from deep as a sophomore (37.5%), he could’ve been the perfect complementary player on the 2018-19 team that so desperately lacked a consistent three-point shooting presence, but he was yo-yoed in and out of the rotation for the latter half of the season. A late scratch by Cam Reddish catapulted O’Connell into a major role in the Sweet Sixteen win over Virginia Tech, but he played just three minutes in the following game which wound up being Duke’s last of the season.
Despite an uninspiring first two seasons in Durham, many around the program remained confident that O’Connell would break out as an upperclassman – he certainly wouldn’t be the first Blue Devil to do so. He averaged 11 points per game in the Devils’ first three contests, but wound up becoming an even more inconsistent version of himself than his first two seasons. He finished the year just 21/77 (27.3%) from three and made the same defensive mistakes that kept him from seeing the court more consistently as an underclassman. Ultimately, O’Connell found himself out of the rotation completely by year’s end for the first time in his career. Leaving the program seemed to be the only way for him to escape Coach K’s doghouse and it shouldn’t have surprised anybody when he entered his name in the portal at season’s end.
For a player who seemingly had all the physical tools to be an impact player, what exactly went wrong for Alex? Could the coaching staff just not tap into the resource of talent or was it impossible to do so? The verdict on this one will ultimately play out in O’Connell’s final season of college basketball. It’s hard to take much from his first season at Creighton; he was planning on redshirting and he wasn’t a part of the team’s plans. With the entire starting lineup leaving Creighton’s program, O’Connell will presumably get a chance to be one of the featured players for the first time in his career. It’s possible that this was a situation that was never going to work in Durham, but if O’Connell shines in his fifth and final year, Duke fans may live to regret letting him get away.
Jordan Goldwire (2017) – #47 PG/Unranked Overall (ESPN), #88 PG/#398 Overall (247 Sports)
Duke Career Stats: 116 G, 16.4 MPG, 2.9 PPG, 1.6 RPG, 1.8 APG
Considering how far down Goldwire ranked on all recruiting sites, this is probably the biggest win for Duke’s recent player scouting/development. As I already covered in greater detail, Goldwire emerged as an elite on-ball defender as an upperclassman who made a positive impact on the floor in spite of severe offensive limitations. Even though he never developed into a productive scorer, he led the conference in assist-to-turnover ratio as a senior. With a year of eligibility remaining, Jordan is heading to Oklahoma, where he looks to be in line for a bigger role. It’ll certainly be interesting to see Goldwire’s impact for another program and whether or not he’ll be able to take his offensive game to the next level for the Sooners.
Joey Baker (2018) – #11 PF/#41 Overall (ESPN), #7 SF/#33 Overall (247 Sports)
Duke Career Stats (To Date): 55 G, 11.3 MPG, 3.8 PPG, 1.0 RPG, 0.5 APG
The only player on the list who’s still in the program, it’d be hard not to consider Baker’s career to date at Duke a disappointment. Baker was considered the #15 overall recruit in ESPN’s 2019 rankings before he re-classified to join the star-studded 2018 class. Other than finding his way onto the cover of Sports Illustrated, Baker’s freshman season was most notable for Coach K’s inexplicable decision to pull his redshirt in February, only to play him a total of 18 minutes for the rest of the season. Thankfully for Joey, he will get that year of eligibility back, if he so chooses, thanks to the NCAA waiver. If the first three years of his collegiate career are any indication, he'll likely need it if he has any intentions of reaching the expectations he had coming in.
Baker was certainly inconsistent in his first full season playing for Duke in 2019-20, but he did have some big games off the bench and helped the Blue Devils get out of some tight spots. One that stands out in my mind was a game at Boston College where the team looked completely lifeless and in line for a vintage mid-week conference road loss. Joey had hardly played the entire game before coming in midway through the second half, but that didn't stop him from sparking the team to victory with eight points in quick succession and energy plays on defense. He only played 28 minutes in the last six games of the season before the coronavirus wiped away the post-season, but it’d be hard to call his sophomore season a failure given the coaching malpractice he endured as a freshman.
Unfortunately for Baker, he was far less productive offensively as a junior and couldn’t carve out consistent minutes for a team that really could’ve used another upperclassman presence on both sides of the ball. What may be a surprise to some is that Baker was Duke’s most impactful defensive player according to on/off splits among players who played over 100 minutes in 2020-21. If his shot had been falling, he would’ve played a lot more than he did and it’s certainly fair to question whether or not he should’ve been given greater liberty to play through slumps. But there is no questioning that his offensive game regressed from his sophomore season, even outside of any cold shooting from deep. His assist rate was cut in half, his turnover rate nearly doubled, and he shot only 30% on two-point field goals. He still can’t be trusted to put the ball on the floor and attack the basket despite plenty of failed attempts to try and do so.
All indications are that Baker will stick around for a fourth season in Durham. While he won’t be the only senior on the roster, he’ll be the only Blue Devil to have been in the program for four full seasons. The role he'll have will largely be determined by whether or not he can consistently knock down outside shots and make good decisions with the basketball. Even in his sophomore season, his shooting accuracy fluctuated from game to game and we’ve seen that Coach K does not have enough confidence in him to let him play through a cold stretch. Duke’s expectations will likely be as lofty as ever in 2021-22 and Baker is going to be called upon in big moments. The entire trajectory of his Duke career will change based on whether or not he delivers in them.
----------
So how should we temper our forecasts for recruits who are viewed as more of a “long term play”? Simple, don’t expect much. The players who are good enough to jump to the professional ranks after one or two seasons are doing so in large abundance for Duke. Those who aren’t are either going to wind up entering the transfer portal seeking a bigger role after being recruited over by the next big incoming class or sticking around in Durham to graduate largely as the same players they were when they arrived. It’s hard to imagine this process changing as long as Mike Krzyzewski is the coach of the Blue Devils, for better or worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment