Originally Posted by
Kedsy
OK, I went back 15 years, looking at every rotation player (or starter) at Duke who had a senior year and compared their senior season to their junior season, to see if seniors generally improve or stay more or less the same. I compared per game statistics and then made a qualitative analysis. So if a senior played a lot more minutes then he will look good in this chart, but that's sort of what we're talking about here so it made sense to me.
I may have missed somebody, but I counted 26 Duke seniors from 1998 to 2012:
Senior year a lot worse than junior year: 4 (Greg Paulus, Nick Horvath, Lee Melchionni, Ricky Price)
Senior year a little worse than junior year, but still in the same ballpark: 2 (Kyle Singler, Steve Wojciechowski)
Senior year a little better than junior year, but still in the same ballpark: 5 (DeMarcus Nelson, Chris Duhon, Sean Dockery, Taymon Domzalski, Nate James)
Senior year a LOT better than junior year: 15 (Miles Plumlee, Nolan Smith, Jon Scheyer, Lance Thomas, Brian Zoubek, Dave McLure, JJ Redick, Shelden Williams, Casey Sanders, Dahntay Jones, Daniel Ewing, Shane Battier, Chris Carrawell, Trajan Langdon, Roshown McLeod)
Obviously some of this is subjective, but I conclude that there's a pretty good chance that our seniors next season make a "jump" and will put up significantly better numbers than they did this season.