I seem to remember that mid 90's recruiting was pretty bad with lots of misses outside of maybe Trajon, Nate, Chris (and Mike too, even though he transferred).
I don't think its the staff. Duke has an image of a privileged white school. Fortunately in 2010 we have 3 African American recruits that may help change that. Nate James and Chris Carrawell will be trying to change the perception.People like Kenny Boynton perhaps John Wall do not feel comfortable in that environment. However Duke is on TV all the time. That is our advantage.We need speed and quickness,which David Cutliffe is going after for football. We need a global reach. Players like Patty Mills overseas are there we need to reach out.Many outstanding Australians are going to schools other than Duke.Coach K's target recruiting has backfired. He needs a backup plan for every target.Kelly and Plumlee may surprise me,but I get the feeling its more of the same type player.2010 with Hairston and Dawkins, we can get back to the top with. We just need 5 or 6 more players with their skills.
I seem to remember that mid 90's recruiting was pretty bad with lots of misses outside of maybe Trajon, Nate, Chris (and Mike too, even though he transferred).
Wow, well I apologize if the subject of transferring is forbidden discussion on this board, I didn't know. I honestly had this kid's best interest in mind when I brought up the subject. I don't know what's best for him, but it just seems like if playing time is something he wants, Duke doesn't seem to be the best fit. That's just my opinion. I'm not saying he shouldn't have been recruited, and certainly that he isn't capable of making a contribution here. This looks to be a deep team at that position for the next few years and I just don't see him getting a great deal of playing time, based on what we saw of him this season - granted its hard to get a handle on this since his minutes were very limited.
Again, I didn't meant to ruffle any feathers, nor did I mean to talk about something that is not allowed.
I'm not sure it's always possible to know how well a HS players skills will translate to ACC ball. When recruited, many thought Greg would have been an excellent ACC PG. When recruited, many thought Nolan also would have been an excellent ACC PG. I still think Nolan has significant potential. Recruiting may be a science but, IMO, there's also an element of luck. I think Coach K has experienced both sides of recruitment luck (lately bad).
Said differently, IIRC, when we recruited Brand, Battier, and Burgess... Burgess was considered the premier recruit. If we hadn't landed him, then that would have a been considered a big miss. Luckily for us, Brand was much better than many predicted.
Last edited by Jeffrey; 03-27-2009 at 05:51 PM. Reason: Try to better explain viewpoint
Yes, but in a different way. According to John Feinstein's "A March to Madness" (1998, back when he was a worthwhile read) Coach K got very busy because he was too nice of a guy to say no to any invitation: "Krzyzewski was convinced that recruiting was the area in which the program had slipped the most since the back to back titles [. . .]. Each Duke recruiting class had players ranked and lauded by all the recruiting gurus. The difference was that Krzyzewski hadn't had the time to get to know them as well as he had in the past [. . .]. If he had had the extra time he might have figured out that Greg Newton and Joey Beard were ill suited for Duke academically and socially. He might have thought twice about Tony Moore's and Ricky Price's ability to handle the school's academic rigor" (72-73).
So back then everyone was delighted with the recruiting classes, but they just didn't work out. I heard nothing but raves about Newton, Beard, and Price (I don't remember much about Moore), but there was a real decline before we bounced back. People like Dickie V (big deal, right?) were saying that Beard was at the same level as Ferry and Laettner, so that will give you some idea.
This is an excellent post. People are looking to 2010 as the class that saves Duke basketball, but at this point can we really expect it to do anything but replace the 2006 class that is still around at that point? Each of them seems to be a solid recruit - though Thornton does seem like he'll be a career backup - but none of them is yet elite (consensus top-15 IMO). And none if them is a PG or true big man. I'm optimistic about the 2010 class but there is no reason at this point to conclude that it is going to dramatically change things with the players currently committed.
I have very similar feelings about 2010 right now. We're talking about a very good stud SG and 2 four-star players. That's a fine beginning to a class, and if you add Barnes it's a very good class. But it's not game-changing at all. We have great wings, so adding more is nice but doesn't address our issues. Thornton will be a solid backup PG in time, but the list of players that were rated the 9th best at their position and started/made an impact as freshmen at Duke is pretty short.
If we can add a real stud post player (like Josh Smith) and a real PG (like Knight) this can be the class that puts us back on top. But until then, all the talk about 2010 as the answer to all of our problems is, IMO, severely misguided.
John Brockman was another near miss who would have helped.
My only criticism, and obviously, I don't know what actually goes on , is that there seems not to be any backup plan that Coach K has. He went after Patterson hard, but Patterson indicated that he wasn going to commit in the Spring. Was there a backup for Patterson? I thought that after Thomas committed to Duke that Samuels would be following soon as they were good friends at St. Benedicts. Did we recruit him heavily ?
Same for Monroe and Boynton...no backup plan .
Does anyone have any other opinion other than Duke doesn't have a big man coach,to explain why we cannot recruit players in the ilk of Boozer, Brand and Williams ? I seems like Pitino, Calipari, Donovan etc can attract these kind of players.
Good post. While I don't agree with a lot of what you say here, I think it's great to recognize that our coaching staff faces a unique challenge in the recruiting world. Namely, people hate us. We're the most loathed program around, and this inevitably will affect recruiting. Our recruits sometimes have coaches, family members, and friends that push them towards other schools. This influence on the recruit can be overt, or it may just be a subtle pressure of him knowing that his parents or siblings or friends have always rooted against Duke.
I think Duke has recognized the issue of Duke hatred and started to combat it. Duke Blue Planet was created to provide the program with positive representation on the web. Nate and Cwell are coaches that some of our recruits can relate to better than Chris and Wojo. Certainly, the Olympic experience will help as well, as Coach K can sit in a recruit's living room and regale him with tales about Lebron and Kobe, who are idolized by young basketball players, especially in the black community.
Duke's recruiting should be on its way back to an elite level. I mean, we're pretty good right now but obviously we want to be elite, which is why this discussion is even taking place. Some of the misses in recruiting that Duke has experienced in recent years that would've made a big difference to the team on the court will start turning into hits. The program is making gradual progress towards repairing its image and combating Duke hatred (and, of course, it's unfair that we even have to do that in the first place, but life isn't fair sometimes). Just stay patient and know that, regardless, our coaches will always bring great kids into the program to represent Duke.
Last edited by Troublemaker; 03-27-2009 at 06:25 PM.
Can we stop with this "everyone hate Duke" poor us stuff.
Sure there are a lot of people who hate Duke, but only because a lot of other people like Duke. A recent public opinion survey had Duke as the #1 most popular basketball team in the country. Duke games always gets the highest ratings.
When you're a popular program that have a long history of success a lot of people are going to love you, and a lot of people are going to hate you. The Yankees are the most "hated" MLB team, the Cowboys are the most "hated" NFL team. They also happen to be the most popular. Same is true for Duke.
You want people to stop hating Duke, start losing a lot, then people won't hate you any more.
This is naive. There's more to this than just winning.
Name Duke's most hated players over the course of the past 20 years. I bet you'll easily find a trend among them.
There's a lot of class warfare / racial undertones mixed in with the Duke hatred. It's unfair, but we have an image of being elitist which needs to be combated.
Until 2004 we could recruit them as well as anyone in the nation (Brand, Boozer, Shel, Hump, McBob). Then our recruiting ace stopped spending his summers recruiting and he took his staff with him.
K is back now, and the question is whether he has the energy and juice to regain the momentum he killed, or whether the precarious situation Duke is in based on academic requirements and anti-Duke sentiment nationally are just too much. I think there's a fine chance that he will. But there's also some concern that the damage is too great, and that our failures are snowballing.
FWIW, I also think there's an argument that the anomaly isn't the past 4 years, but the 7 before that. Brand, Boozer, and Shel were all late additions where things fell our way, in part based on building on the recent success in the post (i.e. Brand came because Quinn was the man, Boozer saw Brand and was willing to follow suit, etc.) Having UNC in such a state of flux didn't hurt either.
That's not to say we're doomed without a Brand/Boozer-type guy. We did pretty well in the late 1980's with high post guys and killer PG's, and if we can get some speed demons and ball hawks in the back court we may be able to return to that style.
Duke can only recruit players who are good enough to get them to the Sweet 16 the past whatever number of times the past whatever number of years, get to the Final Four whatever number of times it was in the past whatever number of years and 3 National Championships, one in this decade. Can someone please name the programs who have done better? If you go back 20 years, Duke is second to none. In this decade we have 1 NCAA title and one Final Four and a number of Sweet 16s. Florida, UConn, UNC, Kansas are the only schools that I can think of that can compete with that. Where is Florida now? They can't recruit I guess.
Imo, K is a great coach and we all know that as well as Duke being a top-5 program. After last nights loss I took a long look at the season and rembered what i thought would be good at the beginning. I recalled saying that this is not a championship team a good 1 maybe final 4 but no championship i hoped and prayed during the year that we would become one but it just didnt happen. I did say though that next year could be great. Think about it. Potentially we lose no starters especially if G doesnt want his last game in college to be his worst. So thats already the top team in the ACC (i think its highly likely that ellington and lawson leave) All year people have been saying how great Kelly and MP2 have been so why critiszce them now. I know its tough after a lose but look on the brightside we were young believe it or not this year and at worst will return all starters and gain 2 more potential big time players. I wont start to fret about the state of the program until we start
A: get into a recruiting scandal like some other schools in order to win
or B: just totally stop getting players ala Kentucky and not make the tournament.
I agree we should be a contender every year but Imo the last 2 years we have been contenders at the least. 2 seed isnt bad. So while this long offseason starts remember we are still at the top and although we may be in a dry spell the sky is not falling.
Not so.
After the McD's AA, Brand was a consensus top 5 recruit, and as high as Number 3 in Prepstars. Burgess was in the 5-12 range. Battier was considered a better recruit in the final stages of that recruiting year. When they initially committed, Burgess was the stud. But by the end of that summer, Brand and Battier were at least considered equals. Avery, though not a McD's AA, ended up much better than thought also.
Hmm, a kid from a southern town at a school with poor academics who is coming on. Bledsoe, come on down.
But, back to the original pt, the final rankings were very indicitive.
Randolf and Burgess had dropped noticiably by the end of the year, whereas other players went up accordingly.
Lately, it seems most of our players have been heading the wrong direction in the final tally.
Paulus and McBob aside. Along with Boateng, the ENTIRE freaking world missed.
There's no doubt that Newton had issues off the court, but I remember him having great athleticism for a big guy. I kept expecting him to break out from his Soph year forward, but he never realized full potential.
He sure as heck would have started at the post on this year's team.