SkyBrickey
Member
247 has Nate listed at 6-9 185, so he's probably growing. Still very thin for a guy listed at PF.
2025 Men's Basketball Recruiting
- Thread starter DavidBenAkiva
- Start date
JasonEvans
Host, The Duke Basketball Roundup
Everyone knows Duke gets the PVI kids from the DMV, and the Sidwell kids usually end up at Villanova. Maybe Scheyer can best Neptune vs K who lost out to Wright.Donald teased this on the Podcast a few days ago....
Acaden Lewis has gotten an offer from Duke. 6-2 combo guard who plays at Sidwell Friends (shout out to Obama's kids) in DC. Top 40 recruit who has recently gotten offers from Kentucky and UConn... so I suspect his ranking may be on the rise.
Donald will have more on this in an upcoming episode of the pod. He might have some inside info here
SkyBrickey
Member
Dang. Must be very skilled to be ranked where he is. Get in the weight room young fella!This was posted to his X/Twitter just a couple weeks ago. Dude is thin.
Maybe but AJ Dybantsa held his own against Flagg when they went head-to-head and is ranked higher. Both are fantastic players.
DavidBenAkiva
Member
The timing of offers for the Class of 2025 is interesting. Recruitment for this class seems to have happened in two phases. During the early phase, the coaching staff spread offers around to most of the top 10 players in the class. Then, the roster had a complete overhaul at the end of the 2024 season. The new offers seem to suggest that the coaching staff is revisiting the class and making adjustments.
My bet is that the coaching staff is going to stick with the Boozer twins and AJ Dybantsa for a couple of reasons. It would be a small tragedy if the Boozers ended up somewhere besides Duke. Cameron Boozer and Dybantsa are just that good. You run the race with them and deal with the consequences if you are successful. That is what happened with Flagg, after all.
The rest of the more recent recruits seem to be replacements for previous offers.
Instead of Meleek Thomas, it's Acaden Lewis.
Instead of Jalen Haralson, it's Shelton Henderson.
Instead of Koa Peat and Caleb Wilson, it's Nate Ament and Nikolas Khamenia.
I'm not sure where Brayden Burries fits into this, if at all. There hasn't been a recent offer for a player like him. Perhaps the coaching staff is still focusing on him.
My bet is that the coaching staff is going to stick with the Boozer twins and AJ Dybantsa for a couple of reasons. It would be a small tragedy if the Boozers ended up somewhere besides Duke. Cameron Boozer and Dybantsa are just that good. You run the race with them and deal with the consequences if you are successful. That is what happened with Flagg, after all.
The rest of the more recent recruits seem to be replacements for previous offers.
Instead of Meleek Thomas, it's Acaden Lewis.
Instead of Jalen Haralson, it's Shelton Henderson.
Instead of Koa Peat and Caleb Wilson, it's Nate Ament and Nikolas Khamenia.
I'm not sure where Brayden Burries fits into this, if at all. There hasn't been a recent offer for a player like him. Perhaps the coaching staff is still focusing on him.
SkyBrickey
Member
Nikolas Khamenia is #29 nationally on 247. Along with Shelton Henderson and Acaden Lewis, that's three offers to kids in that 15-30 range in the past couple of weeks.
MChambers
Member
Goldilocks lives!
Cassius Stanley also played at Harvard-Westlake before transferring for his senior year. The program boasts a long and impressive list of basketball alumni. It’s the most consistently outstanding program in Southern California, and maybe in all of California. Khamenia broke out as a sophomore. Not easy to do on such a loaded team.
sagegrouse
Member
30 second internet search found a match that declared Harvard-Westlake was the top private school in CA.
(Also showed that my grandson graduated from #6. He's gonna play Div 1 baseball and didn't apply to Duke.)
SkyBrickey
Member
I would guess it's an either/or on Boozer and Peat.
Boozer/Boozer/Khamenia/Lewis/Henderson would also be a great class and could mesh very nicely with 5-6 returning players out of Ngongba, Brown, K2, Evans, Harris, Proctor, Foster.
I would be very happy with Boozer, Ngongba, Brown manning the 4/5 next year.
Yeah, I think there are several mutually exclusives amongst the recruiting targets. Jon seems to be casting a wider net to avoid being left scrambling should things not go Duke's way.
Other sites have mentioned that they expect a fair amount of spring commits which can't give Jon the warm and fuzzies.
gam7
Member
If things go as well as we hope this season, we should have good momentum for recruits working toward spring decisions.
JasonEvans
Host, The Duke Basketball Roundup
Nate Ament appears to have a top 7 of UNC, Duke, UConn, Kentucky, Michigan, Virginia, and Tennessee.
SkyBrickey
Member
This is one where it may work in our favor if his recruitment stretches out until Spring when the future of K2 and Evans are clearer.
I wonder if we won't start to see more of these kids do what Liam McNeely did this year and delay their decisions until the the very end of the cycle. Seemed to work out for McNeely landing in an open role at UConn.
If it does trend that way, it will put even more pressure on coaches to fill out their rosters with returnees, recruits and transfers all within a couple of month period. Tough job gets even tougher...
JasonEvans
Host, The Duke Basketball Roundup
Kids are now waiting until spring because everyone is trying to figure out where the NIL market is at. The market exploded so much this past spring that McNeely is likely making more than all but a couple players in the 2024 high school class. So, agents are telling players in the 2025 class to wait so they can have a better sense of how things are shaking out.
And yes, the top high schoolers all have agents who are advising them on navigating the NIL marketplace. It would be foolish for them not to.
SkyBrickey
Member
It makes sense. The overall trend is not great for us IMO.
I don't think Flagg or Maluach or Evans or K2 are at Duke because we offered the biggest and best NIL package. As the agents have more influence and multiple offers get lined up side by side in the springtime, it seems like Duke will be under more pressure to at least match the $ offers of other schools, diminishing the value of our other advantages in recruiting.
I'm sure we will still get our share of top recruits and transfers, but we have to also stay competitive with our overall NIL budget to keep pace.