The Duke Men’s Basketball Team has 12 recruited players. It’s easy to divide them into three groups of four.
Kyle Filipowski, Jeremy Roach, Tyrese Proctor and Mark Mitchell are atop the pecking order, a quartet of returning starters who will absorb four starting spots and a lot of playing time.
Then there are the four freshmen I discussed not long ago, Caleb Foster, Jared McCain, T.J. Power and Sean Stewart.
Maybe one of them gets that fifth starting spot.
Or maybe it’s someone from the final group, the Other Guys, the four holdovers who will have to fend off the freshmen for PT.
Or perhaps the freshmen will have to fend off the holdovers for spots in the rotation.
We don’t know a lot about the size of that rotation. Jon Scheyer had to deal with so many injuries and illnesses last season that we simply don’t know how deep he was willing to go into his bench. Maybe he doesn’t even know.
But nobody has a 12-player rotation, no matter how we define the term. Remember that incredibly deep Arkansas team that beat Duke in the 1994 NCAA title game, Nolan Richardson’s famous 40 Minutes of Hell? That team only had 10 players see the floor for more than 160 minutes and that’s the poster team for going deep into its bench.
Then again, nobody plays a six-player rotation either, at least not often. Even if we add McCain and Foster to Roach, Filipowski, Proctor and Mitchell, that’s only six and there’s PT to be earned.
Whenever Scheyer has been asked about that going into this season he’s consistently had two responses; the players will determine the rotation and stuff will happen during the season to change that, the kind of injuries and illnesses that plagued last season’s team.
Two of the other four holdovers started some last season, while two others barely played as true freshmen.
Then again players make their biggest jumps between their freshmen and sophomore seasons, or so we’ve been told for decades.
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