Taking a look at Duke men's basketball

Wrapping up a four-parter

First the bad news.

The 2025-26 Duke men’s basketball team almost certainly won’t be as good as last season’s team.

Now the good news. It doesn’t have to be. All four of last season’s Final Four were historically good teams, at least by the standards of 21^st century analytics. But that bonus COVID year largely has cycled off.

Make no mistake. Duke benefited from that extra year from Sion James, Ryan Young, Jacob Grandison, Theo John. But since 2014 or we could say two things about Duke almost every time they took the court. Duke was more talented than the opponent, the opponent was more experienced than Duke. Taking away that COVID year doesn’t eliminate the experience gap but it does mitigate it.

Jon Scheyer told the media last week that he started watching the Houston game the day following that season-ending loss but it took him around two months to process everything.

But he added that any season that included an ACC regular-season title, an ACC Tournament title, a Final Four, an ACC record for regular season conference wins and all the rest could only be considered a rousing success.

Was that team a template going forward?

“For me, it’s more about what you’re trying to replicate,” Scheyer said. “I’m poking holes in everything we’ve done. I’m good at that. I’m good at poking holes and expanding the margins. That’s something we always look to do. From a roster standpoint, we knew we had a chance to have five guys drafted, which we did. We also knew that was a lot of firepower to replace. The best way to do that was to get Caleb Foster to come back, to get Isaiah Evans to come back, Pat, Maliq, Darren.

“I’m really happy where we landed. We doubled down on positional size. We doubled down on versatility. And we still doubled down on how to paint a picture of how we come together as a team. At the end of the day it’s not the individual, it’s the team. I think stylistically there’s things I want to improve. I think there are things we can do better. I think it starts with having the right people and I think we do.

What kind of stylistic changes might we see?