It's like the Duke Brotherhood is really the name of a Durham orphanage with a very high adoption rate.
We all call the 2020-21 season an anomaly for Duke basketball; I'm banking on the 2021 offseason as an anomaly as well.
If there are no penalties for transfers, fans will drop. The fan and school investment in players erodes, and viewership would easily drop. There isn't one person who likes what's going on right now. It's akin to NBA stars breaking contract and playing wherever they want the next season. It would destroy the game.
I get the reason for removing the penalty but it cannot be a mainstay.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things. - Winston Churchill
President of the "Nolan Smith Should Have His Jersey in The Rafters" Club
This is just getting absolutely crazy. Coleman was the one guy I thought loved Duke and was there for the academics along with basketball. I am getting cynical about what college bb is becoming, but what is one going to do about it? Good luck Henry, we hardly knew ye! CRAP!
Yeah, it s#%ks big time for the fans — which is what we are here at DBR. We aren’t the player/student, nor are we the player’s family. friends, agent, or coach. We are fans, period. And we have selfish reasons for wanting to see Duke Basketball be great and continue the traditions that have been going on for decades. But it’s pretty much over now. What else can be said? It is what it is.
Over the last 10 years I’ve become less and less of a fan of Duke Basketball while at the same time becoming more of a fan of the DBR community. That’s really the main reason I’m here. It’s not so much about the basketball anymore. What has been lost will never return. I’m fully aware of and grudgingly accepting of that fact.
But I can’t say that it doesn’t still hurt a little bit every time I think about it, though even that has mostly gone away. As a fan you can only take so many punches to the gut before you start to become numb to it. That’s where I’m at now.
Well, I freely admit I was wrong about this. I thought Henry would not cut and run like this just because we signed John. I thought he would try to beat him out for backup big minutes, just like he beat out guys like Tape and eventually Brakefield last year. I have long felt, and stated on these boards, that lots of people think they know things about what goes on in a guy's head, what a guy's character is like, what goes on at practice, the dynamics of the team, leadership issues, all sorts of things -- things about which we actually know very, very little. People like Jim Sumner know it because they see it with their own two eyes and talk to the players and coaches directly. But most of the rest of us have no such knowledge and so we make a lot of assumptions based on very little actual information.
I fell prey to that myself in this situation, believing -- based on really almost nothing -- that because of Henry's character and his solid upbringing and the kind of kid he seemed to be -- that he would stick this out and fight and prove himself and earn his minutes at a great program and school like Duke. That somehow he was different than the rest. Wrong. Apparently, like for seemingly everybody else these days, it's about and only about minutes and exposure right now. Today. Not tomorrow. Instant gratification etc. rather than putting your nose to the grindstone and working for it. Pretty depressing and alienating.
I bought this year's team poster because I thought the cartoon depictions of the players were really cool. As each character departs, it kind of feels like a prophesy, none of us got to see them in person this year, maybe they never really existed. Was the entire season merely a deep fake?
Huh? The five national champions after 2015 had 19 freshmen on their collective rosters, including at least 9 rotation players. Maybe there were only three starting freshmen (not sure, I didn't check), but there were at least two sixth men as well.
It was easy to see coming. I've been posting about this possibility all week, and I wasn't the only one.
Yeah, this could be it. Even so, I don't agree that Theo would give us more than a marginal improvement over Henry in 2021-22. So I think the staff may have made a mistake.
I mentioned in another thread way back when that I didn't expect we'd have all three of Williams/Brakefield/Coleman back next year, and that there was a good chance that 2 of the 3 at least would be gone before the 2022-23 season. I hoped we'd get two seasons out of two of them, but such is the reality of college basketball these days. You simply can't expect top-50 recruits to sit and wait their turn for 2-3 years. If they don't have a clear path to 20+ mpg by at least year 2, the expectation should probably be that they will transfer.
And honestly? I can't blame them. These are kids who know their window of opportunity in college is limited, and they know they don't HAVE to wait in line to get the exposure and opportunity. Keeping Coleman beyond 2021-22 was already going to be difficult, as who is to say we wouldn't bring in an all new frontcourt? Or that he'd grow tired of seeing his peers at other schools getting PT.
It stinks, but that's where we are in college basketball. Hopefully Coleman finds the right situation for himself. I'm sad that it isn't at Duke, but c'est la vie.
I hate this. Like others have said, I really admired what I saw in Henry Coleman both on and (especially) off the court, and I was excited to see him continue in a Duke uniform. But, I *do* understand that this year is uniquely different in so many ways, and I wish him nothing but the very best.
Even so, this revolving door of players is giving me whiplash (mixing my metaphors). Not only Duke, but across college basketball.