Much of the off-season narrative concerning this season’s Duke men’s basketball team involved people coming back.
Rising senior Jeremy Roach and rising sophomores Kyle Filipowski, Tyrese Proctor and Mark Mitchell all turned down professional opportunities to run it back (at least) one more time. Combined with grad student Ryan Young, junior Jaylen Blakes and sophomores Jaden Schutt and Christian Reeves, Duke actually had an experienced basketball team. Not experienced in the sense of one of those teams with three or four or five grad-students but experienced by recent Duke standards.
The 2023-’24 freshman class wasn’t exactly an afterthought. After all people who rank this sort of thing ranked this class second or third in the country. But there was no Zion Williamson, no Paolo Banchero.
Jared McCain (12 in the RSCI consensus rankings), Sean Stewart (15), Caleb Foster (17) and T.J. Power (21) all projected as talented prospects who would start as complementary players, stick around for longer than a season and turn into stars.
Down the road.
Which brings me to McCain.
He’s a 6-3 combo guard from the Sacramento area. He was named a McDonald’s All_American--nine points in the big game--and Gatorade California State Player of the Year as a junior and senior. He averaged 18 points, seven rebounds and four assists as a senior and led Corona Centennial High School to the 2021-’22 state championship. McCain excelled in the big summer AAU tournaments and helped the U.S. team win the 2022 Fiba U18 Americas championship in Mexico.
A pretty impressive resume to be sure. But nothing we haven’t seen on a regular basis from incoming Duke freshmen.
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