Duke men’s basketball is depending on its veterans even with another excellent recruiting class.
Naturally, the Duke Blue Devils recruited four five-star freshmen for the upcoming men’s basketball season. Duke operates in that manner. Under Jon Scheyer, it took place under Mike Krzyzewski and will go on for some time to come.
However, it’s becoming more and more clear that the veteran players on the Blue Devils, especially those in their sophomore class, will determine how the team plays out its season.
Jeremy Roach, a senior guard, leads the team. Sean Stewart, Caleb Foster, and Jared McCain, all freshmen, play important roles. However, Tyrese Proctor, Mark Mitchell, and Kyle Filipowski appear set to define this season for the 14–4 Devils.
Take Tuesday night in Louisville, for example. Just one minute and eleven seconds into the second half against the Cardinals, Roach hobbled to the bench. The Duke guard was out for the evening after sitting out an unexpected loss to Pittsburgh due to a reinjured right leg. In the end, he would walk on crutches out of the KFC Yum Center.
Being cautious? Perhaps. But the Blue Devils would have to play the remainder of the game without their skipper in the midst of an unexpectedly close game.
It was taken up by the sophomores. Proctor scored a game-high 24 points, including 13 in the second half. With 10 points and nine rebounds in the second half alone, Filipowski came dangerously close to a double double, finishing with 17 and 15 points along with a team-high five assists. After missing the first two games due to an injury, Mitchell was unstoppable at the rim, finishing with 20 points and 12 rebounds. Duke improved to 5-2 in the Atlantic Coast Conference with an 83-69 victory.
During that second half, Filipowski claims he had an epiphany during an in-game huddle. “We have a lot of experience, and I’m thinking that while I’m in the huddle,” he says.
Regarding his veterans, Scheyer states, “It’s really everything.” “I considered Flip, Mark, and Tyrese in particular, as they went through last season; we experienced similar situations when things kind of broke apart. Naturally, they were the ones having the most conversations in the huddle. All three of them guys made a significant contribution.
Naturally, those three were members of their own elite recruiting class. 247Sports ranked Filipowski as the fourth-best player in the country, Mitchell as the thirteenth, and Proctor as the twenty-third. Together with Dariq Whitehead (ranked third overall) and Dereck Lively II (ranked second overall), they came to Duke University last year.
One-and-dones occur at Duke. That was the situation with Whitehead and Lively. The others chose to stay for a second season even though they probably would have been drafted. Both the program and the players have benefited from this.
For Filipowski, who may be the most dominant men’s college basketball player not named Zach Edey, that is especially true. The 7-foot New Yorker is better in every way.
Fitzpatrick has gained almost eighteen pounds of muscle. His outside shooting percentage has increased dramatically; he shot 28.2% three-pointers the previous season and 39.7% this one. Additionally, he is more effective inside the arc, improving his accuracy from 50.5% to 54.7% from two-point range. In comparison to last season, he has already blocked more shots this season (33) and is a lot stronger distributor (55 assists this season compared to 56 all last season).
“I think I’ve improved in all aspects of my game,” Filipowski says. “Just really seeing my skill set be a lot more fine-tuned, I believe, it’s great. I’m going for more blocked shots, playing defense on guards on the perimeter, things like that.”
A big part of Filipowski’s plan to get ready for his sophomore season was arthroscopic surgery on both hips. That’s improved his flexibility and alleviated pain he played through all last season.
“Oh man, you don’t even know,” Filipowski says. “It was pretty bad for my left hip, daily, just going through sharp pain. I played through it and tried not to make any excuse or anything, but it’s a great feeling just to feel normal.”
After missing nearly all of four games in December due to an ankle sprain, Proctor is finally starting to play more frequently. During his first four games back, he played an average of 22.8 minutes; the next three games, he played more than 30 minutes each.
The 6’5″ Australian, an inconsistent perimeter shooter, surprised Duke by making a career-high four three-pointers against Louisville. Proctor’s ability to drive and create is improved and the Blue Devils become more difficult to stop if he poses a constant threat from the outside.
“I’ve been working on it the last two weeks, three weeks,” Proctor says. “I’ve been staying confident the whole time—my shot hasn’t been falling the way I wanted last year or the start of this year, but the coaches and my teammates keep believing in me. I’m going to keep shooting the ball.”
Similar to Filipowski, Mitchell has improved his game by adding strength and polish. He is getting to the foul line more frequently (5.3 attempts per game, up from 2.7 last season), and he has been Duke’s greatest offensive rebounder. It’s no accident that Mitchell was out for the Devils’ hard-fought loss to the Pittsburgh Panthers on Saturday, and that his injury-related absence was conspicuous when the team faced the Tennessee Volunteers in the 2023 NCAA tournament.
Having won the ACC tournament and nine straight games, Duke came into that tournament on a roll. Hopes for the Final Four blossomed. However, a second-round encounter with the brutish Volunteers revealed a variation in hardness and seasoning.
n the opening minutes, 24-year-old Tennessee enforcer Uroš Plavšić sent 19-year-old Filipowski sprawling a couple of times. It was strong, but it was effective—the Volunteers set a physical tone that the Duke freshmen struggled to combat. That game was one of those wheels-falling-off occasions Scheyer referred to.
“I refer to the Tennessee game a lot,” Scheyer says.
Unable to dent Tennessee’s brutal interior defense, the Blue Devils stayed outside and kept misfiring. They shrank from the fight. Twenty-two of their 49 shots in that game were from three-point range, and they made just six of them in a 65–52 upset loss.
“It was a great lesson in how you need to play through physicality,” Scheyer said in October. “Were we completely ready for that? Probably not. We probably hadn’t seen a defense like that.”
Nearly a year older, wiser, stronger and tougher, Duke is more prepared for the Tennessees of the college basketball world. That list, somewhat surprisingly, now includes North Carolina. The Tar Heels have morphed into what Ken Pomeroy rates as the No. 4 defensive team in the country.
Duke visits Chapel Hill on Feb. 3 for the first meeting of the season between the two archrivals. With the Tar Heels ranked No. 3 and the Devils No. 12, this will be the highest-wattage game between the two since their epic Final Four clash in 2022.
There will be the usual collection of freshman talent when these two face off, but also several old guys still in starring roles—Roach for Duke, Armando Bacot and RJ Davis for Carolina. Duke’s chances in that game—and all the other big ones to come—largely rest with three sophomores whose decisions to stay in school are paying benefits.
