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College Basketball 2021-2022

I looked up his month by month stats at some point. Iirc, he had a really good March shooting the ball but he turned it over a lot. In February, it was just the opposite. Bad shooting but great passing and decision making.

So he's still all over the place. But I'll say that earlier in the season we weren't getting either good decision making or good shooting. So there are some signs of progress there.
 
All we need to do is have Zion come on campus every year and tell the freshmen that if they stick around for at least 3 years, he'll take them to dinner.
 
And for good measure, here's his last 12 games (so all of Feb and March). You'd still like that 3pt percentage to come up and turnovers to go down, but 49/32/88 coupled with good rebounding, a high assist rate, and solid defense isn't going to hurt you if that's your 4th-5th option.

Screen Shot 2021-04-09 at 3.37.08 PM.png
 
In only a few short years, the landscape has evolved to the point where we can reminisce about how much value we got out of 2-year player, Luke Kennard. One good but not great year in Kennard's freshman season, hindered by a wildly fluky 3pt%, which kept him off of the NBA 1st round radar, and then an all-time efficient offensive season as a sophomore, due in large part to his 3pt% merely correcting itself.

Look at what the DJ Stewards and Cassius Stanleys of the world are doing now, and Kennard's career value to Duke is like a dream that we can never get back in reality. We would've been lucky if Steward shot 15% from 3 on high volume last season. Wouldn't have made the NCAA Tournament regardless, but could've gotten him back for another season.
 
OK State just fired Cade's brother. Was it really worth playing on a mediocre team with bad teammates so your brother could have a single year earning 1/100th of what you will make next year?

If we imagine Cade on even a bad team like 2021 Duke or UK, he probably elevates them far beyond what OK State achieved. Also, Cade's endorsement deals probably look a lot better if he's coming off a season at Duke. I get that he was the #1 pick either way, but not all #1 picks achieve the same level of branding.
 
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Another thing about Moore is most of the reason to be annoyed by him as a player is almost entirely due to coaching. He’s a victim of K. Those stupid shuffle steps he does to take a contested 19 footer instead of an open 3... this is not on Moore, a teenager who probably isn’t all that into math and analytics. That’s Mamba mentality, which most kids adhere to.

He took 26% of his shots from midrange last season while hitting 27% of those shots. He shot an excellent 65% at the rim and is a good FT shooter. How does that shot profile happen? Would any NBA coach allow a young rookie who is elite at the rim and from the line to settle for a ton of midrange shots? It would potentially ruin a career. At Duke, this is the norm these days. No one wants to teach Moore how to make simple adjustments to his game to become an efficient player the NBA might be interested in. “Never take that shot.” Too much effort to say this.
 
Without having paid that much attention to Cade this year, it's easy for me to imagine he may have actually benefited from being the clear alpha and only OAD on his team, and still being on a Power 5 team and getting them in the NCAA.

Just imagining the potential personality clashes or just moodiness that could come when you've also got Boston/Clarke, or Johnson/Steward, and they all want some of the OAD spotlight to shine on them. I'm not sure the "talent" of Duke/Kentucky offsets that kind of stuff.

It may be best with a guy like Cade who's a willing passer, but I can still see the upside of what he did from the standpoint of enjoying his year. Which may not be the same as getting a round less far in the Tournament than he could have elsewhere.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Another thing about Moore is most of the reason to be annoyed by him as a player is almost entirely due to coaching. He’s a victim of K. Those stupid shuffle steps he does to take a contested 19 footer instead of an open 3... this is not on Moore, a teenager who probably isn’t all that into math and analytics. That’s Mamba mentality, which most kids adhere to.

He took 26% of his shots from midrange last season while hitting 27% of those shots. He shot an excellent 65% at the rim and is a good FT shooter. How does that shot profile happen? Would any NBA coach allow a young rookie who is elite at the rim and from the line to settle for a ton of midrange shots? It would potentially ruin a career. At Duke, this is the norm these days. No one wants to teach Moore how to make simple adjustments to his game to become an efficient player the NBA might be interested in. “Never take that shot.” Too much effort to say this.
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This. Also, additionally, the threes:

I don't have the numbers with me (and I'm technically in a work Zoom now), but someone on TDD also pointed out that Moore was something like 33% and 41% from the corners, but more like 18 or 19 percent on threes from beyond the hashmark. I'll look it up and correct it later.
 
childress22 said:
Without having paid that much attention to Cade this year, it's easy for me to imagine he may have actually benefited from being the clear alpha and only OAD on his team, and still being on a Power 5 team and getting them in the NCAA.

Just imagining the potential personality clashes or just moodiness that could come when you've also got Boston/Clarke, or Johnson/Steward, and they all want some of the OAD spotlight to shine on them. I'm not sure the "talent" of Duke/Kentucky offsets that kind of stuff.

It may be best with a guy like Cade who's a willing passer, but I can still see the upside of what he did from the standpoint of enjoying his year. Which may not be the same as getting a round less far in the Tournament than he could have elsewhere.
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I think this understates Cade's impact. Swapping Roach out for him would have been absolutely huge.

Also, Johnson left the team anyway. So I'm not sure why he matters. Steward, despite his dumb decision, didn't seem like a selfish ballhog. Cade is not either. And I don't think it's a Bagley-Carter situation where the clear positional overlap would create fiction.

And while Cade's situation worked out okay, the gap between it and a place like Duke easily could have been much larger. Look at Fultz in Washington and Simmons at LSU.
 
rome8180 said:
@Pantone287 I'm not sure the "what if you fail" conversation is one that's easy to have with recruits and still get them to come to your school. You're either suggesting you don't have faith in them to play well enough to be a high draft pick or you don't have faith in your staff to make them that. That's not actually what you would be saying, but it could easily come across that way.

I gather that a lot of recruiting is essentially blowing smoke up recruits' asses.
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I don't know that it's that impossible of a conversation to figure out how to frame, given the amount of resources that goes into recruiting. Basic conversations about goals and priorities are standard in any other business.

Are they really telling every top 20-50 recruit like Steward that they're going to be OADs, though, and that not being a guaranteed first rounder after one year would be failure? I sure hope not.

It seems to me that, for guys in that range, you should have that conversation about their goals and priorities, and if it rubs them the wrong way to even consider the possibility of not being a OAD, then great, bullet dodged. Plenty of other top 100 players who would provide far more value as multi-year guys once you DQ out those particular fringe five-stars with unrealistic expectations.

That particular profile - fringe five-stars who are dead set in OAD - are probably the least valuable players in the top 100, really. I don't know why we'd tailor any part of our recruiting pitch towards appeasing them.
 
I doubt they're telling them that not being OAD is a failure. They probably want to avoid that word altogether. But I'm sure they're telling them all, "We think we can get you to the league in a single season if that's what you want."

Based on stuff that recruits have said, I feel like the amount of ego fluffing coaches do in recruiting is cringeworthy. It's like half ego fluffing and the other half is K dropping references to how he "coached" whatever famous player the recruit admires in the Olympics.
 
Also, given how little playing time there is for guys 8-13 on a Duke roster, you probably end with guys with unrealistic self-evaluation regardless of what pitch you make to them. No sane 2nd tier player is going to commit to Duke and expect playing time.
 
On the subject of recruiting, I really feel like K should be able to show up to a recruit's house with a printout of this picture and wordlessly place it on the table and leave.

duke stars.jpeg
 
I don’t really get the negativity towards Stanley. He out performed his recruiting ranking and was the third best player on a good Duke team. Stanley had a much bigger impact than Steward and he made the right decision to leave. Most of these guys would benefit from returning for another season and improving. Frank Jackson would’ve likely boosted himself into the first round if he returned as a sophomore and ran point for the 2018 team. DJ Steward would’ve likely improved his draft profile with better sophomore shooting and playing with studs like Griffin and Banchero.

Kennard, Tre Jones and Matt Hurt are all recent examples of vastly improving draft stock by returning for their sophomore season.
 
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