Recruiting is supposed to be fickle and unpredictable, but Jon Scheyer is making this look easy. Duke landed Cooper Flagg to headline the top-ranked class of 2024 and less than a calendar year later, Cameron Boozer joined The Brotherhood with his highly-rated twin, Cayden, to boot.
Update the charts. Flagg and Cameron Boozer are the two best recruits Duke has ever landed in 247Sports’ modern recruiting rankings dating back to 2000.
Every general manager, coach and on-the-road scout is looking for the next great four-man. It’s arguably become the most important position in modern basketball because they’re needed to do, well, everything.
- Rebound.
- Defend multiple positions.
- Shoot from 3-point range.
- Help dominate the paint defensively and offensively.
- Cover up space.
- Guard hefty centers and protect the rim.
- Switch onto lightning-quick point guards.
- Can you guard wings? Maybe do some early Christmas shopping, too, before you go?
Duke is going to have the best 4-man in the country for the next two seasons in a row, even if Scheyer might not get them on the floor together for a nanosecond.
Flagg is the favorite to be the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. He still has to earn it, but the hype is warranted. Lots can change between now and the 2025 NBA Draft, but Cameron Boozer or undecided phenom AJ Dybantsa is expected to be the No. 1 pick. Whoever goes No. 2 would go No. 1 in dozens of drafts.
Duke has done the five-star thing. They’ve had hyped recruits and lottery picks. And yet, this recruiting run feels different.
Welcome to the new golden era of Duke recruiting.
Flagg and Boozer provide symbols of proof that Duke has one of the elite roster-builders in the country. Scheyer, armed with a fierce determination to win a championship and plenty of self-awareness to become approachable, is cooking with gas.
His roster-construction decisions are foolproof and sound. Scheyer’s fluid, flexible blueprints just make too much sense and feature smart back-up plans to the back-up plan.
It also helps not to need a backup plan. Flagg was the priority and Duke got him. The Boozers were the priority and Duke got ’em.
Even if it meant tough conversations with members of The Brotherhood, Duke eliminated positional overlap and let standout players like Jeremy Roach leave on its way to building this 2024-25 club into a National Championship contender. Scheyer has constructed a team that should be elite defensively. He added a boatload of shooting, via both the portal and the high school ranks, to add more spacing around Flagg. Duke’s rotation won’t feature anyone smaller than 6-foot-5. It’s big, nasty and ridiculously talented.
It’s all a concerted effort to best support a 17-year-old phenom.
It also sets a precedent of what Cameron Boozer can expect next season. There might be a mass overhaul in the next 365 days, depending on what intriguing freshmen like Kon Knueppel, Darren Harris and Isaiah Evans want to do, but Duke’s roster will probably make a bunch of sense when the smoke clears.
There’s a new standard at Duke.
Turns out, life without Mike Krzyzewski in charge isn’t so bad after all.
