Duke basketball: 5 questions the Blue Devils must answer in 2020-2021

Duke basketball needs to answer these five key questions in 2020.

There are few college basketball programs with as much tradition and success as Duke. An NCAA Tournament regular, the Blue Devils were on track to make a deep March run again before the tournament was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

While there is still a big picture question of what college sports will look like this year, for the purposes of this exercise we’ll assume the games get played as scheduled. Coach K hopes to lead Duke basketball back to the Final Four and another national title. To do so, the Blue Devils must answer these five questions.

5. Duke questions: How will the freshmen class fit in?

Over the past few years, Duke has relied on an ever-increasing amount of top freshmen to fill out their roster. 2020 looks to be no exception as Duke has a six-man recruiting class coming in with three five-star recruits.

The headliners are forward Jalen Johnson, point guard Jeremy Roach and shooting guard D.J. Steward. None of them are ranked inside the top-10 of ESPN’s 2020 rankings, but all have a shot to be very good.

Relying on freshmen is a risky exercise since there are a wide variety of outcomes, as evidenced by the wildly different levels of regular-season success Duke experienced over the past two years. If this group of one-and-dones is closer to the Zion Williamson-led Blue Devils than last year’s Vernon Carey-led team Duke will have a chance to be really good.