Originally Posted by
ikiru36
Just to address this one point, for whatever reason it seems that there is frequently a huge maturation in ability to add muscle mass beginning around age 18/19. This is just a reminder to take into account kid's chronological ages, not just what class they are in. While these are more anecdotal observations, I'll simply point out that in this year's class, Zoubek and Thomas were our youngest, as was McRoberts the year before. In fact, in comparing them to Hansborough, upon matriculation to Duke they were almost 17 months younger than he was at the same point in his career.
Related to this, I'm willing to consider points about player's strength development later in their Duke careers, particularly if they didn't suffer summer injuries, but comparisons to Hansborough are particularly unbalanced due to the age difference.
Just as a couple of other anecdotal references regarding this, our more physically mature players in this class (though still with vast room for improvement) were Henderson and Scheyer, both of whom turned 19 early in the school year. Ellington, Wright and Lawson as well. And the two other ACC freshman who'd jumped out at me as surprisingly physically mature (such that I bothered to check their ages) were B. Costner who will be 20 in just 4 months and G. Vasquez who already turned 20 just after the new year (and is actually a couple months older than Josh McRoberts).
I'm sure that there are anomalies as well, and if someone wants to research the trends I'd be happy to be corrected. Otherwise, please at least take this into account when saying "X could easily have put on 15-20 lbs of muscle prior to his freshman year."
P.S. The one frightening anomaly I uncovered during this cursory search of player ages. Kevin Durant was pretty much the youngest player in this year's Freshman class. Yikes!
FYI- my source for Date of Birth data was "www.draftexpress.com" so if the information I've quoted is incorrect, blame them, not me ;0)