The Duke Chronicle’s Annual Basketball Preview

The Duke Chronicle’s Basketball Preview is out and while it’s not as extensive as it has been in years past, it’s still worth your time to read.

The basic preview is more or less what you’d expect – a review of the returnees, the freshmen and the transfers and the potential Jon Scheyer’s group has.

The player previews are recounted of course and then the writers predict the season record.

It took a minute to realize why the records seemed so low, then we got it: it was only the regular season. No ACC Tournament, no NCAA tournament predictions at all.

And that put the predictions around 25-27 wins. A better way to look at it is the number of predicted losses: 6, 4, 5, 6, 5, 4, 7. Add two potential losses to each – one in the ACC Tournament, one in the Big Dance – and that’s the most losses any of the writers could predict.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, with Kentucky, Arizona, Kansas, Auburn and Illinois on the schedule, there will be significant non-conference challenges. We’re really curious about Kentucky. After initial skepticism, Mark Pope thoroughly won over Kentucky fans who love how he’s connecting with his old school’s traditions. We’ll get into it more when that game is closer but he’s a major change from John Calipari in every way. Pope hasn’t coached a game for UK yet, but if we were Kentucky fans, we’d be excited too. Actually, we kind of are even as Duke fans. It’ll be a different UK.

Of course, it’s never been easy to run the ACC table, annd Duke has never had an undefeated season. As far as we can remember, only two ACC teams ever have – UNC 1957 and NC State 1973.

Duke’s best seasons – measured by the fewest losses – were 22-2 in 1941-42 (which doesn’t really count because World War II called so many young men away), 27-3 in 1962-63, 26-4 in 1965-66, 37-3 in 1986, 34-2 in 1992, 37-2 in 1998-99, 35-4 in 2000-01, 31-4 in 2001-02, 32-4 in 2005-06 and 35-4 in 2014-15.

The 1992 team has to be the best but the 1999 team wasn’t far off: it was 37-1 going into the national championship game. The first loss came to Cincinnati on a beautiful last-second play in the Great Alaska Shootout. The second came in the national championship against UConn.

Duke was five points from an undefeated season. Might as well be 5,000.

What will this year’s group do? It almost certainly won’t go undefeated, but it should be an outstanding season. And for better or worse, it’ll almost certainly be judged by what Duke does in the postseason. That comes with the territory.