MChambers
Member
There are suggestions that he is bound for Illinois. He’s got the last name for that team, since they seem to excel at recruiting from Eastern Europe.
MBB: The 2025 Transfer Portal
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EvanMiya weighs in, again, on how to build a CBB roster:
Brooks Holton (@brooksholton.bsky.social)
Can confirm: James Scott has entered the transfer portal after one season with Louisville basketball. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/sports/college/louisville/2025/04/23/james-scott-louisville-basketball-transfer-portal-2025-26-roster-pat-kelsey/82708948007/bsky.app
1. Fill your roster with good basketball players
2. Returning players should account for at least 50% of the playing time
3. Prioritize recruiting players who will play at least 2 seasons for you
Eh, I feel like Duke sort of doesn't fit that. We pretty much max out on #1. This past year is a great example. We had so much talent that it didn't matter that we didn't have returning players.
If you have less talent, it probably does help to have multiple returning players.
But for Duke, I think it's "get the most talented players you can", and "make sure we have enough experience on the roster".
rhynelander
Member
Sorry no link, but I saw on socials that he's been linked to Florida and Illinois most heavily in the past day or two.
My personal read was Stojakovic was insurance in case Slim left?
kAzE
Member
Illinois seems to be involved in a ton of wing prospects. They are also the favorite to land Dame Sarr and are also in the mix for Jahmir Watkins and Chad Baker Mazara. There's apparently some deeps pockets over there.
They picked up a committment from Mihailo Petrovic today, which is probably going to go under the radar, but he's a 22 year old professional Serbian guard (Serbians are pretty good at basketball) who averaged 14.3 points and 7.3 assists in the Adriatic league. That's a pretty huge pickup for them, after losing Kasparas Jakucionis to the NBA.
Illinois appears to be a program on the rise in the NIL/portal era. Kind of wish Duke went out and scouted in Europe a bit more.
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brevity
Member
Some updates.
Eli DeLaurier is transferring to East Carolina. I would consider him a possible reason to watch whenever the Pirates play an ACC team, but last season they didn't.
Blake Harper is down to four destinations: Creighton, LSU, Ohio State, or returning to Howard.
scottdude8
Moderator, front page and podcast contributor
This is what we should keep in mind: what has many of us excited about this offseason so far isn't necessarily that we've gotten "older," but rather that we've created continuity. In all likelihood 3 of our 5 starters next season will be returners from last year. Our sixth man (Maliq) will be a returner as well, and there's a real chance another returner (Darren) will earn a sharpshooter-off-the-bench role.EvanMiya weighs in, again, on how to build a CBB roster:
Brooks Holton (@brooksholton.bsky.social)
Can confirm: James Scott has entered the transfer portal after one season with Louisville basketball. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/sports/college/louisville/2025/04/23/james-scott-louisville-basketball-transfer-portal-2025-26-roster-pat-kelsey/82708948007/
1. Fill your roster with good basketball players
2. Returning players should account for at least 50% of the playing time
3. Prioritize recruiting players who will play at least 2 seasons for you
Miya has shown that each of the national champions in the portal era has had returners account for >50% of the team's minutes played. Last year in the final four we were a crazy outlier in only having ~25% of our minutes played by returners (mostly Tyrese, supplemented by Caleb)... the other teams were in the 70-80% range. You can get "old" in the portal, but you can't get the continuity that we'll have from returning 5 scholarship guys.
We're talking about a grand total of five data points here, right? And four of the five were fit retroactively into his model?
If any one of a dozen low probability events had gone the other way in the Houston game, then probably his whole model is shot, on the very first data point that came after he created the model.
martydoesntfoul
Member
Is it accurate that due to portal entrants, graduations and NBA draft declarations, Baylor currently has no players!? This is ridiculous. What a world.
SkyBrickey
Member
No, they lost all their players. But 247 days they have 6 incoming transfers and 2 incoming freshman. Eight players. So they are in a similar spot as Duke.
brevity
Member
Baylor has no returning players, but they are building a 2025-26 roster. (Cameron Carr was a midseason transfer who had to sit out, so while he's technically "returning" to Waco in the fall, he's still new as a player.)
(source)
Last year of eligibility
6-3 guard Obi Agbim (from Wyoming)
6-10 center Caden Powell (from Rice)
6-9 forward Michael Rataj (from Oregon State)
6-6 guard Daniel Skillings Jr (from Cincinnati)
6-2 guard JJ White (from Omaha)
2 years of eligibility
7-0 center Juslin Bodo Bodo (from High Point)
6-4 guard Cameron Carr (from Tennessee)
3 years of eligibility
(None)
4 years of eligibility
6-5 forward Tounde Yessoufou (RSCI #19, On3 #15)
6-7 forward Andre Iguodala II (On3 #197)
MChambers
Member
scottdude8
Moderator, front page and podcast contributor
SouthernDukie
Member
I want Jimmy Chitwood. But I'll settle for Cedric Coward. And that's who I'm pretty confident we are focusing on and will get.
SkyBrickey
Member
I hope you're right. Hate that it may be a bidding war with Alabama. Cultural fit will be huge for Jon with any transfers. Mason, Sion and Maliq were all highly additive in that regard.
Yep. I mentioned elsewhere when Miya's thesis came up that Duke doesn't really fit that model. Because we can frequently bring in freshmen who are off the charts. Most teams can't do that. Those other freshman-heavy teams on the list weren't bringing in top-tier freshmen, as can be seen by their preseason roster rankings and preseason polls.
Duke has, in the last 4 years, had two teams make the Final Four with ~50% of the roster being freshmen and under 50% returning player minutes. And in each case, it was a freshman who was leading the team (by a lot). The 2023 team's issue wasn't that we lacked returning players. It's that our freshman class wasn't good enough (Whitehead just didn't live up to his high school ranking; Lively started out hurt and took a while to find his groove), our backcourt wasn't good enough, and our experienced transfers weren't good enough. That, and we caught a bad break in terms of injuries (Whitehead and Lively early on), which caused us to be a bit underseeded for the tournament. And we thus were forced to play a very underseeded 4-seed despite us being a top-13 team.
Miya definitely does some interesting analytics. But this is kind of garbage. Especially because I suspect that the vast majority of teams will have over 50% of their minutes be returning players, while basically 1-2 teams a year are able to field really good freshmen. So it's logical that the most likely outcome is that the champion of a 6-game, single-elimination tournament is going to have a lot of returning players.
SkyBrickey
Member
Desmond Claude? Interesting. High usage player. 15.8ppg, 31% 3-point shooter, 4.2a, 3.5tov. Maybe those numbers would look a little better in a Duke offense, but seems like one step down from Coward and Sarr. Where he might be a step up though is pure ballhandling.
SkyBrickey
Member
Possibly loading him up with UW courses over the summer to graduate? I have no idea. And I guess UW has zero incentive to work with Duke. I did read that he was an honors student in HS so maybe he is close to his degree.
WSU, but yeah.
One thing that helps his chances is that the last 3 years were all at state schools in the Washington system. So there is a better chance he graduates this Spring than their would be for a guy who played at 3 schools in 3 different states. I would imagine the policy for carrying over credits is different for schools under the same university system umbrella.