Originally Posted by
Kedsy
First of all, I don't think Jalen Johnson can fairly be categorized as failing to work out. While quitting on the team might not have been a great look, while he was on the court his stats compared favorably to those of Roach, Stanley, Hurt, Moore, Reddish, Duval, Trent, Giles, Jackson, D Thornton, Jeter, Kennard, and Allen, and were pretty close to Winslow and Steward, which as a group represent the vast majority of Duke's highly rated but outside the top five freshmen of the past seven seasons. Jalen may not have been at the same level as most of Duke's top 5 recruits, but that makes sense since he wasn't a top 5 recruit.
More relevant to this conversation, guys of Johnson's recruiting rank work out a heckuva lot more than guys outside the top 100.
First of all, Miles Plumlee was RSCI #81, so even he may not be a good predictor. I agree that Duke hasn't explored this range of recruit very often (probably in the RSCI era, the only examples are Tyler Thornton, Lee Melchionni, Andre Sweet, and Nick Horvath). Though I also don't think there's any reason to believe the #100-ish guy would perform better than guys like Dave McClure (#71), Alex O'Connell (#69), Olek Czyz (#66), Marshall Plumlee (#61), Jamal Boykin (#60), Jordan Tucker (#59), Marty Pocius (#53), and Alex Murphy (#49), since all of them were rated significantly better. In fact, other than Thornton and O'Connell, no Duke freshman rated worse than #33 in the RSCI era has played more than a smattering of garbage time minutes. It's very unlikely a guy in this range would contribute anything other than practice as a frosh.
As a practice player and future possible rotation piece, sure bring him in. Duke so rarely goes even close to the 13 scholarship limit that a guy with a good attitude can help even if he doesn't ever play.
My point in my original post was simply to say that saying *this guy is rated so much better than Jordan Goldwire and look how good Goldwire became* is a bit of faulty logic.