It's never too early to start looking wayyyyyy ahead to next year's draft!!!
SI.com has their "way too early" 2020 Big Board up. It's quite interesting with regards to Duke players. Particularly:
- Vernon Carey is the first Duke guy to show up, and he's all the way down to 25. After being a consensus Top 5 recruit and projected lottery pick for so long, this seems to fit with the storyline that scouts have soured on him slightly. I imagine someone will subtly let him know to add fuel to his fire
- The list is only a Top 30, so Tre Jones, Matt Hurt and Wendell Moore are nowhere to be found.
FWIW, the 2020 Mock Draft at
NBADraft.net was updated fairly recently, and has Carey at 13, Tre barely in the first round at 29, and Javin in the second round... none of our other freshmen are on the list. This site isn't the be all and end all, obviously, but between that and SI's Big Board it seems clear that none of our freshmen besides Carey are considered one-and-done "locks" by the scouting community.
That said, if Hurt shows the shooting touch we all expect, considering how the draft went (with Cam Johnson and Tyler Herro jumping into the lottery based on shooting, and a guy like Jordan Poole who was initially viewed as an undrafted prospect jumping into the late first round as a deadeye shooter) he could easily make a monumental leap.
Obviously these projections are the very definition of "way too early", but I think it bears emphasizing that this year's team will be different than the last few years... there are no consensus projected lottery picks amongst our very talented freshmen.