Ryan Kelly was a solid role player for Duke last season, but there was a point where it looked like he was poised to expand his role significantly.
With 16:31 left in the second half of the Jan. 27 game at Cameron Indoor Stadium against Boston College, he pulled down an offensive rebound but missed the putback. With that, his streak of 18 consecutive field goals came to an end. Although the streak was bound to conclude at some point, it showed that he had the potential to become a legitimate scoring threat.
Kelly finished that game with 14 points, completing arguably the best stretch of his career, in which he averaged 15 points and six rebounds over three games while shooting 84 percent from the field. The Raleigh native had once been the 12th-ranked prospect in the nation according to Scout.com, and it appeared as though he was finally living up to that potential.
The rest of that season, though, Kelly returned to his role-player status, averaging only six points a game during the regular season from there on out.
“It wasn’t that I wasn’t confident last year, but I went through ebbs and flows and I didn’t fight through it the best I could,” Kelly said.
The talent that earned Kelly high praise as a recruit has shone through during Kelly’s hot streaks. His excellent work ethic and basketball IQ have helped him highlight the strengths of his skill set, especially his jumpshot, but he has at times struggled to create his own shot or get to the rim off the bounce.
If the Blue Devils are going to make a run come April, they are going to need the Ryan Kelly from those three games last January against N.C. State, Wake Forest and Boston College.
Fortunately for Duke, if the four games played in China and Dubai this summer are any indication, that improved Ryan Kelly may be the one that shows up.
Throughout the trip, Kelly led the Blue Devils with 15 points per game on a stellar 67.6-percent performance from the floor. He shot a strong 44.4 percent from behind the arc and ranked second on the team with 8.3 rebounds per contest. The rebounding performance was particularly important for a player whose lack of strength has caused him problems on the boards in the past. Upon returning from China, his teammates praised him as the team’s most improved player.
“I’m glad that my teammates see that in me because I worked really hard this summer,” Kelly said. “Most of them were here this summer and witnessed me working very hard and they worked hard themselves. I knew I made a huge jump from my freshman year to my sophomore year, and I needed to continue to make that same type of jump from my sophomore to my junior [season].”
Kelly was referring to his jump from non-factor—limited to only 6.5 minutes a game as a freshman—to the 20-minute-per-game role player he was last year. He upped his points per game from 1.2 to 6.6 between his first and second campaigns.
The Blue Devils will certainly need Kelly to make another leap with the holes left by Kyrie Irving, Nolan Smith, and Kyle Singler. That trio accounted for more than half of Duke’s points last year.
To help fill those holes, Kelly will have to put in plenty of work beyond the hours he logged this summer. But that has never been a deterrent to him in the past.
“I work hard,” Kelly said. “That’s something I pride myself on. I have God-given height, but I don’t have a lot of other characteristics of a great basketball player athletically. I have to work hard every single day to improve those aspects of my physical nature and of my game. I’ve done that every chance I’ve gotten, so that’s what’s made me a better player.”
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