I'm so thankful we are getting players like Jaylen. He has great passion, and has a chance to work into leadership.
Your post is the latest manifestation of the adage -- "Every silver cloud has a gray lining."
Kindly,
Sage
'The first I remember were the lamentations on the Board after Ted Roof's first team in 2003 beat GT and UNC, fearful that he would leave for a stronger football program'
Sage Grouse
---------------------------------------
'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
While I agree that if Jaylen Blakes ends up as good as the guys you list, he could very well get 15+ mpg next year, I think you're still not giving enough weight to competition on the roster. Here's a list of the number of Top 40 players on the rosters of the 13 players you mention:
2016 SMU (Shake Milton): 1
2007 Maryland (Greivis Vasquez): 2
2014 Pitt (Michael Young): 0
2015 Gonzaga (Domantas Sabonis): 1
2014 Villanova (Josh Hart): 0
2010 Texas A&M (Khris Middleton): 0
2013 Mich St (Denzel Valentine): 4
2016 Tex A&M (Admon Gilder): 4
2016 Villanova (Mikal Bridges): 1
2011 Syracuse (C.J. Fair): 2
2013 Louisville (Montrezl Harrell): 3
2014 Kansas (Frank Mason): 6
2009 Kansas (Markieff Morris): 2
2022 Duke (Jaylen Blakes): 7
Nine of the 13 players were on rosters with two (2) or fewer Top 40 guys to compete with. Three other teams had 3 or 4 Top 40 guys. Only 2014 Kansas had anywhere close to the seven (7) Top 40 players that will be on Duke's roster next season. Mason got 16 mpg on that Kansas team, suggesting a similar amount of playing time is possible for Jaylen if he can beat out two top 40 guys like Mason did, but the likelihood of Jaylen being as good as Frank Mason as a freshman is probably a lot less than the 15% or 28% that you're tossing out there.
You raise an excellent point about Duke’s talent depth vs a typical top 20 team. Thanks for digging up the numbers.
While a typical top 20 team may not have as many highly rated recruits as Duke, they likely have several very good players. While I am hopeful, I am not entirely confident that Duke's 2022 backcourt of Jeremy, Wendell, and Trevor will be head and shoulders better than the average Top 20 backcourt.
I honestly don’t know the best objective way to project what role a specific player on Team X would have if they played for Team Y, especially if Team Y is Duke. I am open to suggestions if anyone has any good ideas how to do this.
Looking at advanced stats is probably a decent way to start, so I did some poking around on basketball-reference.com and Torvik’s site. It seems that it is fairly common for borderline Top 100 guys to have advanced stats (Box +/-, Win Shares, Win Shares/40, PER, PRPG!) as Freshmen which are in line of what would be expected from a typical Top 15-25 recruit. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about these stats to know which ones might be most appropriate and which ones might be biased in favor of guys who played for less talented teams.
Another option is to look at All Conference Teams. In the past three seasons, there have been 42 guys ranked 85-100 in the RSCI who played for major conference teams. Of these 42 guys, 10 made their conference’s All-Freshman team. Two more players received the 6th most votes. So, ~25% of recent borderline Top 100 players made their conference’s All-Freshman team. That is certainly higher than I expected. I could be way off, but my gut feeling is that a guy who was good enough to make a major conference All-Freshman team would stand a decent chance (say 50%) of competing against Wendell Moore, Jeremy Roach, Trevor Keels, Joey Baker, and Theo John for a spot as Duke’s 6th or 7th man.
Here’s a summary of the advanced stats of the 12 All-Freshman team nominees compared with last year’s stats for select players.
I should point out that these Borderline Top 100 All-Freshman team guys all played for worse teams than what we expect from Duke 2021-22. I don’t have any great ideas for translating how much an All-Freshman team player on a less talented team would play for Duke in 2022, so it is possible that many of these guys could end up deep on the bench for Duke.Code:
PLAYER RSCI TEAM G MPG PRPG! BPM PER WS WS/40 ORTG D-RTG AdjEM Awards Tyrell Terry (20) 88 Stanford 31 32.3 7.7 5.2 19.3 4.5 0.179 106 88.6 17.4 Pac12 All-Freshman Bennedict Mathurin (21) 91 Arizona 26 24.8 6.1 6.6 20 2.9 0.181 121.6 95.4 26.2 Pac12 All-Freshman Jaden Shackelford (20) 98 Alabama 31 28.9 6.1 4.3 18.3 3.2 0.14 113.4 101.2 12.2 SEC All-Freshman Jaden Ivey (21) 87 Purdue 23 24.0 5.7 5.5 18.2 1.9 0.136 103.2 91.4 11.8 B10 All-Freshman A.J. Lawson (19) 91 South Carolina 28 30.1 5.6 2.8 15.9 2.2 0.102 98.4 98 0.4 SEC All-Freshman Derek Culver (19) 85 West Virginia 26 26.7 5.4 2.6 18.7 1.7 0.097 97.5 95.6 1.9 B12 All-Freshman Jared Butler (19) 95 Baylor 34 26.7 5.3 2.8 14.7 2.6 0.116 106.6 98.7 7.9 B12 All-Freshman K.D. Johnson (21) 87 Georgia 16 22.4 5.1 3.9 18.9 1.1 0.126 98.9 94 4.9 SEC All-Freshman James Akinjo (19) 89 Georgetown 33 30.8 5 -0.1 14.4 2.3 0.09 100.3 103 -2.7 Big East All-Freshman Jaime Jaquez Jr. (20) 96 UCLA 30 26.4 4.8 4.2 17.3 2.7 0.132 106.3 96.4 9.9 Pac12 All-Freshman (6th) Kadary Richmond (21) 89 Syracuse 28 21.0 4.2 5.5 18.4 1.9 0.126 103.6 92.4 11.2 ACC Freshman of Year (6th) Tari Eason (21) 93 Cincinnati 23 19.6 3.5 2.2 18.3 1 0.093 90.8 90 0.8 AAC All-Freshman Average RSCI 15-25 Freshman 4.5 2.8 102.8 93 9.8 Wendell Moore Jr. (21) 25 Duke 24 27.2 4.9 1.6 15.2 1.7 0.104 92.8 91.1 1.7 Jeremy Roach (21) 20 Duke 24 27.1 4.2 -0.8 11.7 1.3 0.079 102.1 101.7 0.4 Joey Baker (21) 37 Duke 23 11.5 1 -2.7 6.6 0.1 0.013 83.2 100 -16.8 Theo John (21) Marquette 27 26.3 4.9 3.9 16.6 2.1 0.121 106.7 94.5 12.2 Wendell Moore Jr. (20) 25 Duke 25 23.6 3.9 0.5 11.7 1.4 0.096 92.8 91.1 1.7
One final thing. Coach K seems to like defensive-minded guards. If Jalen plays solid defense and is good enough to make a major conference All-Freshman team, I suspect he will be on the court a fair bit for Duke - even if he ends up being the 4th best guard on the roster.
Yeah, ultimately we'll just have to see how good he is. Coach K is only going to regularly play 7, maybe 8 guys. Something that perhaps sets him apart from the coaches of some of the other players on your list (I haven't done that research and don't plan to).
Which means that if Jaylen can outplay Joey Baker and become the 8th man (4th perimeter guy), he could earn 8 to 15 mpg (probably more towards the lower end, but you never know). If he can outplay Baker plus one of our other guards, there's a path to 20+ mpg.
The thing is, the most probable reason why a guy ranks around #100 is because he's not good enough to be an major conference all-freshman player. If that's the case with Jaylen Blakes, then he won't play much. And as we've been going back and forth about, even if he is that good, he'll only play if he's also good enough to be Duke's 7th or 8th man.