I think the bigger problem is it’s seemingly impossible for K and his staff to differentiate between can’t miss, immediately positive stars versus negative or zero-value OADs. Everyone in the world except for one very, very special Duke fan would’ve taken Barrett over Zion to lead a team to a title in their freshman year. It turned out Zion with 40% usage and someone like a sophomore Buddy Boeheim or senior Tyler Thornton as his sidekick would’ve been much more likely to win a title.
Bagley, Okafor, Parker, Reddish, Rivers... all were viewed as can’t miss prospects who would be immediately positive stars as freshmen. You could even throw someone like Duval into that group—plenty of reputable scouts had Duval as an elite prospect. These guys were all projected OAD lottery picks out of HS, and they ended up being lottery picks. For their one year at Duke, they turned out to range from massively negative overall (Reddish) to close to net zero players due to terrible defense (Bagley, Parker) or warping the offense too much around them (Okafor, Rivers). Even Tatum wasn’t amazing as a freshman, and he was like a top 10% outcome for an OAD in college performance.
K’s approach to roster construction since striking gold in 2015 has frankly been inexplicable and disgusting. You have to be able to do one of these things at a high level if you want to succeed in this era:
1. Evaluate OAD talent to separate the true can’t miss guys from the ones who will be lazy on defense, toxic on offense or simply not that good overall. Don’t rely on recruiting services by just picking the top ranked recruits. Pick the OADs who you believe will be immediately positive players in your system, with the offense and defense you know you can run well.
2. Develop non-OAD-caliber prospects to either lead your program or at least complement the OADs. This has been discussed, and I think the clear consensus is K has been a disaster in player development for a while now.
3. Quickly teach OADs who don’t come in as immediately great overall players, or adjust your system to hide their weaknesses. This is a combination of impossible and never going to happen under K. When he actually does adjust, it happens with very little of the season left to play (e.g., 2018 zone and 2021 Mark). This isn’t going to change, and any successor from his coaching tree is likely to take the same approach—run your system into the ground, until it becomes more than 100% clear that it will not work with these players, then make a massive change that your players only have a few games to adjust to.
K and his staff (and any other program) have needed to do just 1 of those 3 core competencies well in order to have an elite team and/or make a Final Four. Doing 2 or 3 of those things well would produce a heavy favorite. They have consistently done 0 since 2015.
Proper OAD evaluation coming out of HS (competency #1 above) seems extremely difficult to me, and not really K’s fault when he misses over half the time on “can’t miss” players, which would make me lean toward taking a more “Villanova” approach to building a team. But then the problem becomes K’s inability or unwillingness to even make a good faith effort at accomplishing #2 or #3 above. The result is, ultimately and sadly, Duke’s best chance at a title being to do exactly what K has been doing: take a near-blind shotgun approach where we get 3-5 OADs every season, regardless of how well they would fit the roster or system, and just hope they turn out incredibly well, like in 2015.