Transfer portal relatively quiet for Duke women

Is that a good thing?

So, how did you spend your May 1^st? A brisk romp or two around the Maypole? Maybe a quick check to see what the Cicadas were up to?

If you’re a college basketball fan, May 1^st meant something else. It was the last day to enter the Transfer Portal.  Now, note--and this is important--it was not the last day to grab someone from the portal. Just the last day to enter the portal. And it can take a day or two for the paperwork to sort itself out.

But even given that caveat, I think we can safely say that the Duke women’s basketball team did not lose anyone to the portal.

That has not been a given in Kara Lawson’s brief tenure at Duke. Following the 2022-’23 season Duke lost five players to the portal, Celeste Taylor (Ohio State), Shayeann Day-Wilson (Miami), Lee Volker (Marquette), Jordyn Oliver (Vanderbilt) and Shay Bollin (Illinois).

You may recall Jon Scheyer’s Duke men’s basketball team famously lost no one to the portal.

Fast forward a year and we see Scheyer losing seven players to the portal and Lawson zero.

In addition to the five transfers out after the 2023 season, the Duke women also lost Elizabeth Balogun, Taya Corosdale, Mia Heide and Imani Lewis, all of whom exhausted their eligibility.

But Lawson only brought in two transfers for last season, Taina Mair from Boston College and Camilla Emsbo from Yale. But she brought in four freshmen; a fifth joined the team at the semester break.  

Which brings us to next season. Duke only loses two players, 6-6 Kennedy Brown and 6-5 Emsbo.  She’s bringing in three freshman, one transfer and hopefully welcoming Vanessa de Jesus back into the rotation after knee surgery kept her off the court last season.

The incoming transfer is Riley Nelson, a 6-2 forward from Maryland. She was a McDonald’s All-American out of Clarksburg, Maryland and averaged 5.1 points per game as a freshman in College Park. She has a reputation as a versatile defender. She also was named winner of the 2024 Big Ten Sportsmanship Award, which is pretty cool for a freshman. Character matters.

But she ended the season on the mend following ACL surgery. Not clear when she’ll get the all-clear.

Her addition gives Duke 14 recruited players. The limit for women is 15, so technically Lawson still has a scholarship to play with. But nine recruited players sitting on the bench is a lot.  

Maybe Duke’s roster is locked down.

But there are some question marks.  Brown and Emsbo were Duke’s only pure centers and they’re gone. Duke’s three incoming freshmen are all front-court players. Ari Roberson is 6-4 and a McDonald’s All-American. But she’s a bit on the willowy side and the Lawson defensive learning curve is pretty steep for a freshman.

Actually, we don’t really have much of a frame of reference for freshman centers. Lawson’s centers have always been veterans, Jade Williams and Onome Akinbode-James inherited from Joanne P. McCallie and then a bunch of transfers, Brown and Emsbo among them.

So, maybe the Texan will figure it out right off the bat and lock down the center spot for four years.

But I suspect a more modest role, at least to begin with.

Janessa Cotton is 6-2, from California. She has a reputation of playing bigger than her size. But espnW ranks her 80^th in the 2024 prep class.

Then there’s Toby Fournier, a 6-2 Canadian. She didn’t make the McDonald’s All-America team because, well, she’s Canadian. But she’s excelled in international play against Americans for years, including 11 points, seven rebounds and two blocks for the World Team in last month’s Nike Hoop Summit.  She excels in space, attacks the offensive boards with a ferocity that has to be seen to be believed and can dunk. In real games. Real dunks.

But her perimeter shooting is a work in progress. She was 1 for 6 from the foul line in the Summit.

If this sounds like a slightly taller Jadyn Donovan, there is a lot of overlap. Neither has the skills necessary to play on the wing and you do not want either to be part of your center rotation.

But they’re too good to sit.

If they’re going to split 40 minutes at the 4, where does that leave Delaney Thomas?

Playing lots of 5, I suspect, unless Lawson pulls a portal 5 rabbit out of her hat. Thomas is 6-3 and showed lots of promise last season. Remember that game at home against North Carolina, the one where Thomas led Duke with 19 points and seven rebounds?

A Thomas-Roberson platoon could work. May have to.

Rising sophomore Jordan Wood is 6-4 but she’s going to have to live in the weight room to become a post player.  

Center may not be the only committee position.

I’m also not convinced Duke has s true point guard. Mair averaged 6.6 assists per game at BC but dipped to 3.6 at Duke. That still led the team but by the end of the season Mair was spending a lot of time off the ball, with sophomore Ashlon Jackson handling the point; Jackson averaged 2.6 assists per game.  

Assuming de Jesus is fully recovered she could regain her role as a high-energy combo guard off the bench. But I do not think she’s a starter at this level.

Belgian Louann Battison joined the team at mid-season. She looks like a natural point guard. But all of her 12 minutes were in mop-up situations and at 5-5, I don’t think it’s unfair to wonder if she can guard ACC talent.

That leaves the wings and that’s where is gets really exciting. Reigan Richardson will be a senior next season. It’s no secret that the 5-11 Charlotte native suffers from confidence issues. But when she’s on, she’s darn near unstoppable, a smooth three-level scorer with a shooting stroke to die for.

Richardson finished the season with 63 points in Duke’s three NCAA Tournament games. Her 12.4 points per game led Duke. In fact, it’s the highest ppg total for anyone under Lawson, which says something about Lawson’s defense-first philosophy and her willingness to go deep into her bench.

But championship teams need a go-to scorer or two and Richardson has a real chance to become that scorer.

I’ve saved the best for last. Oluchi Okananwa might be the best prospect Duke has had since Elizabeth Williams joined the team. She’s a long way from a finished product. Her super power is a turbo-charged, high-energy style that never stops, never slows down. She’s in attack mode all the time. At 5-10, she led Duke with 6.1 rebounds per game, in only 21.5 minutes per game. She hit 35% from beyond the arc, 76% from the line. She was named the ACC’s Sixth Player of the Year.

But she also ran herself into too many one v. everybody turnovers. She turned it over 2.4 times per game and that’s without being a primary ball-handler.

Can she learn that sometimes intermediate speed is better than full-speed ahead and pick her spots?  

If so, well, look out.

Now, how does Lawson find minutes for Richardson, Okananwa, Jackson, Mair, rising junior sharpshooter Emma Koabel and de Jesus?

Even with her exhausting defensive intensity, that’s a lot of players pining to get off the pine.

Still, too much talent is better than not enough talent. This could easily be her best team . The fact that her last two classes combined have consisted of eight high-school players and only three transfers suggests a paradigm shift. She’s told me more than once that her preference is to recruit high-school players, keep them around and develop them.

It’s too early to project how she can best allocate those 200 player-minutes among 14 players, especially with uncertainty surrounding de Jesus and Nelson.  

That’s why she gets paid the big bucks.