With experience and continuity, Duke has the pedigree of two famous predecessors

Before Jeremy Roach, there was Quinn Cook.

Before Quinn Cook, there was Jon Scheyer.

There’s a lineage of senior leadership on this Duke team that ties it straight back to the Blue Devils’ last two national-championship teams. It’s not exactly a straight apples-to-apples comparison – Tyrese Proctor emerged as Duke’s point guard last season, with Roach moving off the ball – but it’s close enough.

In a program that tends to start over anew every fall with a new crop of superstar freshman, only one – TikTok star Jared McCain – is expected to play a major role this season. And while Dereck Lively jumped to the NBA, not unexpectedly, Proctor and Kyle Filipowski and Mark Mitchell are all back as sophomores.

In terms of minutes played last season, Duke can count more coming back this season, about 73 percent, than in any year since 2009, which included the core of the eventual 2010 champions – Scheyer, Nolan Smith, and so on. This will be the first Duke team to start only one freshman since 2017, and that team would have started two if Harry Giles were fully healthy.

All of it, from Roach’s veteran status to the sophomores who stuck around, represent an uncommon degree of continuity for a program that has, over the past six years, been in the 90th percentile of Division I when it comes to youth according to stats guru Ken Pomeroy.

The question, the eternal question, is whether all this experience will translate into postseason success for a program that isn’t in this position that often – but has capitalized when it has been. But this much is already obvious and indisputable: It’s different. Scheyer, as a coach, has a second team that resembles his last as a player.

In that respect, the Duke season that starts now feels a lot more like those two historic ones, and to an extent the disappointment of 2011, when Kyrie Irving was supposed to be a turnkey solution to replace the graduated Scheyer at the point but missed almost the entire season with a toe injury.

Scheyer was not a natural point guard, but he moved into that role late in the 2009 season and occupied it fully in 2010, surrounded by veterans like Smith and Kyle Singler and Brian Zoubek and Lance Thomas. While Kentucky was all-in on one-and-done freshmen – John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Eric Bledsoe – Duke had one last triumph with a more traditional develop-and-evolve roster full of older players.

But Irving’s arrival in 2011 marked the beginning of Duke’s own one-and-done era, and other than 2013 – when Duke came within a game of the Final Four with another veteran group – the parade hasn’t really stopped since, lottery pick after lottery pick. The 2015 team was full of them, but it also had Cook, a fiery veteran still smarting from that loss to Louisville in 2013 and the embarrassment of the first-round flameout against Mercer in 2014.

Cook proved a stabilizing force on that roster full of incendiary talent, and while Duke has had seniors since – and Grayson Allen was a layup falling off the rim from a Final Four as as senior in 2018 – this is the first team without an obvious freshman lottery pick.

Instead, it has a couple sophomores likely to go high in the first round and a senior leader who went through the heartbreak of 2022, when Roach was a sophomore on the freshman-driven team that lost to North Carolina in the Final Four in Mike Krzyzewski’s final game. That puts him in the Cook role with this group. And while he may have been moved off the ball, and Scheyer was moved onto the ball, Roach is also playing the role his coach once played.

Another class of hotshot freshmen arrives next fall, with more to come after that. While Duke has dipped into the transfer portal under Scheyer, the overall recruiting philosophy hasn’t changed: Get the best players Duke can, and enjoy them while they last.

In this case, they’ve lasted a little longer than normal. That gives this team roots in 2010, when a group of older players could still build toward eventual success, and roots in 2015, when a senior was the unifying force on a team of younger players of extraordinary talent.

Duke has talent again. It always does.

But Duke also has experience and continuity, which it often does not.

All of this is different for Duke. The question is whether it proves as potent as it certainly will fleeting.

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