When it comes to sports, I’m painfully and naively optimistic.
That comes about from a decade of rooting for the worst baseball team in America (the Detroit Tigers) and a lifetime of rooting for the most pathetic professional sports franchise in the world (the Detroit Lions). After every loss, every injury and every season, something in me still maintained hope that next year would be the year that we would win a championship.
Which is why it pains me to admit that I don’t feel the same way about Duke’s chances next year.
Now let me clarify, making predictions eight months before the 2011-12 Blue Devils begin practice is premature to say the least. And even if we do make predictions, Duke by any measure will still be very good. Austin Rivers will likely be the best freshman in America, and Duke should still compete for the ACC title. But as we all know, expectations at Duke—fair or not—are always a national championship, even if the program is a mere season removed from last reaching that summit.
Immediately after the Blue Devils’ painful loss to Arizona last week, I started to hear the same words fluttering around campus—”It’s OK, we’ll win it next year.”
It’s time to temper those expectations, folks.
Unless something major changes, next year’s Duke team will be a near carbon copy of this year’s, but with less experience and talent. The Blue Devil backcourt will once again be loaded, with Seth Curry, Tyler Thornton and Andre Dawkins joined by Rivers, the No. 1 recruit in the country, along with five-star perimeter players Quinn Cook and Michael Gbinije—but Duke will conceivably be starting two freshman in Rivers and Cook, and there won’t be a senior guard on the team. The frontcourt will have another year of experience—but it’ll be led by the same players that were outrebounded 25-9 by a much shorter Arizona team during the second half last week.
Blue Devil fans will be hounded by the same questions all season—whether Duke lives by the three and whether the Plumlees (now all three) will ever become legitimate big men, as opposed to just men who happen to be very big.
But what if Kyrie Irving comes back, you might say? Even though there’s a miniscule chance of that happening, given Irving is a consensus Top-5 pick despite only playing 11 collegiate games, how would that team be any different? Despite Rivers’ abundance of talent, a freshman and a committee of Curry, Dawkins, and Gbinije can’t replace two of the best players in Duke history in Kyle Singler and Nolan Smith.
And even if they could, the Blue Devils would still be burdened by the same issues down low.
No one player is to blame for the Arizona annihilation. The Wildcats could not have played any better. But being outrebounded definitively by a team that was 193rd in the country in that category is a rather humbling statistic. All season, we’ve heard that all the Blue Devils needed was for Miles and Mason Plumlee to fill the roles of Brian Zoubek and Lance Thomas as rebounders and defenders—but when it mattered most, they showed little evidence that they ever will.
Still, though, we’re eight months away from the season. Duke fans have time to beg Irving to return for one more season, salivate over Rivers’ enormous potential and analyze the development of the Plumlees, Ryan Kelly and Josh Hairston down low. Who knows—Irving could shock the world and return for his sophomore year, Rivers could actually be a basketball messiah and Duke’s frontcourt could put on a collective 100 pounds of muscle and develop consistent post moves.
Perhaps Duke can win its second national title in three years.
Oh no. I’m doing it again.
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