That’s Not A Portal... It’s A Black Hole
And Duke could only escape its pull for so long.
It’s official: Jon Scheyer’s first offseason was the exception, not the norm.
It now seems inconceivable that the Blue Devils somehow avoided the portal altogether last offseason, and ended the year as the only team in the Elite 8 to field a starting lineup comprised entirely of “home grown” players. Most experts and insiders expected some regression to the mean this offseason, which manifested when starters Mark Mitchell and Jeremy Roach entered the portal.
Few, though, foresaw the complete decimation of the roster that concluded Friday when Sean Stewart announced his departure, following his classmate TJ Power and five other Blue Devils. In all, only two scholarship players are left from the 2022-23 squad: Tyrese Proctor and Caleb Foster.
The portal is inescapable.
It seems obvious now that Scheyer’s first offseason just delayed the inevitable. After all, a similar story played out eight miles down the road last offseason, when North Carolina faced its own exodus of seven players to the portal. This year, an Alabama team riding high off of its first every Final Four and its head coach spurning other offers has lost 5 players, including two returning starters. Tournament teams like Arizona and Wisconsin have lost multiple starters. In the aftermath of coaching changes, meanwhile, the rosters at Arkansas and Kentucky are almost completely bare.
The writing has been on the wall that teams like the Blue Devils’ 2023-24 squad were a dying breed. Duke just got a one-year reprieve from the chaos.
Barring a Hollywood-worthy twist, this is the new normal of college basketball (alas, the NCAA is unlikely to tear off a mask, Scooby-Doo style, and reveal itself to be a competent organizing body all along). Coaches will have to re-recruit their players each offseason. Teams will be able to get older, proven quantities instantly through the portal, rather than have to work through the natural growing pains of young players.
Scheyer faced an impossible task this offseason, not only balancing a desire for roster continuity with the reality that his competition was rapidly improving through the portal, but working against the unrealistic expectations he created for himself. The average fan may never know with absolute certainty what was the chicken and the egg between his pursuit of transfers like Maliq Brown and Brandon Angel and the decisions of Stewart and Power to move on. We do know that Duke’s incoming recruiting class is one of the best in recent memory, headlined by a star in Cooper Flagg that may actually live up to the overused “generational” moniker, and Scheyer is facing enormous pressure to maximize that windfall. While he will face a storm of criticism following this exodus, said storm would surely become a tsunami if a Flagg-led team underachieved because he was holding on too stubbornly to the past.
Watching Stewart, Mark Mitchell, Jeremy Roach, and the other former Blue Devils wear other uniforms this fall will surely hurt. But the story is only half-written. We don’t yet know how Scheyer will fill the voids left by these departures, and if he’ll find his own version of Cormac Ryan or Cam Spencer, transfers who became beloved by their fan bases and made major contributions to winning in just a single year on their respective campuses. If he does, Duke Blue confetti may rain down next April, and the fans frustrated today will find themselves blissfully unaware that Duke, like all of college basketball, has been swallowed by the transfer black hole.