A Closer Look At This Week’s Duke Basketball Scrimmage Video

With the chaos of the transfer portal winding down, mid-summer quickly becomes a content desert for the college basketball fan. Duke’s social media team doesn’t use that as an excuse for some downtime, though, as evidenced by a recently released 9 minute clip of a 5 on 5 scrimmage.

As with most of these practice videos, it’s heavily edited, and thus must be taken with a grain of salt. Still, this offers perhaps the clearest insight yet into what the 2023-24 squad will look like, albeit without expected star Kyle Filipowski (still recovering from hip surgery). So, what reasonable conclusions can we draw?

• Duke’s returning depth players look much more confident. The footage shows both Jaden Schutt and Christian Reeves much more involved in the offense than in any footage we saw during their freshman campaigns. With four incoming 5* freshman expected to earn minutes alongside Duke’s five returning rotation players, the Blue Devils should easily be able to go 8 or 9 men deep this season. Development from Schutt and Reeves (and one can add Jaylen Blakes into this mix) could give Duke the option of going 10+ deep, a major luxury.
• Ryan Young is trying to add a three point shot to his arsenal. We don’t know how many shots Ryan is missing in these practices, but this is now the third straight release of footage that conspicuously includes a confident-looking Young nailing a shot from beyond the arc. If Young can add even a 30% deep shot on low volume to his arsenal, that will make it…