A pretty amazing statistic: the number of unique starting lineups this year

[scottdude8]

I'm not sure this has gotten the amount of attention it deserves, but here it is: Duke has used eleven unique starting lineups this season. Eight of those, including the one that debuted last night, were used for only a single game. The most common, a lineup of Jones/Goldwire/Stanley/Hurt/Carey, has been used in eight games (two of which were losses).

This is mind-boggling to me, because normally when you think of teams with this much fluidity in their starting group, it means that they've been hit with a lot of adversity, often injury based. And yes, Wendell's injury likely caused some of these lineups, and Cassius was also out for a game. But there's no doubt that this flexibility has been by choice. Think about the added challenge that poses to opposing coaches, who legitimately don't know which 5 players Duke will trot out to start a game, something that's only been increased now that we've debuted our smaller, "four around one" lineup.

For context, last year, with many more injury concerns, we only had 8 unique starting lineups. In reality, two lineups (the four freshmen stars with either Javin or Marques at the 5) started 28 of 38 games. In 2017-18, we had five total starting lineups the entire season. 2016-17 we had 10, but again that was a year with significant injuries (Giles, Tatum early in the year, etc.). 2015-16 we had 6 starting lineups. The National Championship year of 2014-15 we only had 3 the entire season.

Just another statistic quantifying how unique and special this team is.

[AGDukesky]

Well Jones did miss two games as well as Baker. Not huge injury issues but Jones especially caused a couple extra lineups and different people have been out for different games. Still it does seem that K has really tried tweaking lineups for matchup purposes more than usual.

[mkirsh]

How about this derivative stat - the only players not to start a game are Javin (who started 16 games last year), JRob, and Buckmire

[scottdude8]

Well Jones did miss two games as well as Baker. Not huge injury issues but Jones especially caused a couple extra lineups and different people have been out for different games. Still it does seem that K has really tried tweaking lineups for matchup purposes more than usual.

Good point, I forgot about the games Tre missed.

Perhaps this is more illustrative then: of our eleven unique starting lineups, only three have been used multiple times: the most common one I highlighted previously, the lineup of Jones/Stanely/Moore/Hurt/Carey (4 games, 3-1 record), and the lineup of Jones/AOC/Stanley/Hurt/Carey (4 games, 4-0 record). That means we've had 8 starting lineups that we've only used in one game. That means K is really confident trying a bunch of different combinations of our puzzle pieces based on who's played/practiced well, the matchup, etc.