Zion Williamson, R.J Barrett, Cameron Reddish and the Duke Blue Devils look the part as the best team in college basketball this season. Of course, Coach K’s team has appeared in only one game to this point but, in a thorough destruction of a fellow blue blood program in Kentucky, Duke looked fantastic. In response, some are now flatly assuming that the Blue Devils will cut down the nets in early April.
Of course, that is at least a little bit silly, simply because the NCAA Tournament is a series of 40-minute games with no margin for error, meaning that the best team doesn’t always win the ultimate college prize. Duke does, however, boast a rare collection of talent with three projected top-five picks in the upcoming NBA Draft and it is very easy to get carried away with excitement when discussing the team’s upside in 2018-19.
In fact, Duke looked so good in its opener that, in the sports media world, discussions are being had as to whether the Blue Devils could theoretically compete with the worst teams in the NBA, namely the hapless Cleveland Cavaliers. ESPN analyst Paul Pierce floated this hypothetical on the air this week and, while this is frankly preposterous, it did inspire some high-level Las Vegas bookmakers to come together on a fictional point spread for the game.
let the fun begin again! … regarding a hypothetical Duke vs Cavaliers under NBA rules on a neutral … @SuperBookUSA we’d go with:
Duke
Cavaliers -22.5— Jeff Sherman (@golfodds) November 9, 2018
It can be a lot of fun to discuss this kind of thing and, thankfully, the Cavaliers are listed as overwhelming favorites here. Predictably, a lot of fans jumped in to discuss Williamson, Barrett and Reddish as players with NBA traits right now, and they aren’t wrong to suggest that. With that said, there is a reason that the smartest folks in Las Vegas would list this made-up line so high and that is because Duke would have absolutely no chance.
Yes, the Blue Devils have at least three players (and potentially four if you count point guard Tre Jones) that wouldn’t look out of place on an NBA floor tomorrow. With that said, most college freshmen aren’t impact players at the NBA level and, even if you give Duke’s trio a ton of credit as potentially tremendous rookies next season, it isn’t a certainty that they would be off-the-charts effective against a team full of NBA players.
Beyond that, the Cavaliers roster, which is admittedly flawed to a high degree, is filled with more than a dozen, full-fledged professional basketball players. Duke does have some talent beyond their top four but, to put it bluntly, the Blue Devils don’t have anything approaching an NBA-caliber bench and the Cavaliers still possess rotation-caliber players in bunches.
For one brief example, Cavaliers guard Collin Sexton has been, by any measure, a below-average NBA player to this very early point in his professional career. Sexton may have a bright future but, after a full college season as a high-end prospect, a full summer of development and a full NBA training camp, he is an actively harmful NBA player on most nights. In contrast, Sexton would have likely been the preseason national player of the year if he returned to college for a second season and, at the very least, would present a huge advantage for the Cavs against Jones… while being one of the bottom-tier players in Cleveland’s rotation.
To be honest, we don’t need to do this anymore but, in both the NBA and the NFL (where the same discussion is happening with Alabama and teams like the Raiders and Bills), this conversation occurs on an annual basis. Duke does have more elite talent than 99.9 percent of college basketball programs ever had and there is something to be said for that. What the basketball world shouldn’t do, though, is lend credence to the thought that Duke’s No. 5 through No. 10 players could hold up over the course of a 48-minute game against the pros from Cleveland.
