Duke men’s basketball has raised five national championship banners, been to 17 Final Fours (the third most of any school) and claimed 24 conference regular season titles. The program has produced some all-time great teams, from the back-to-back national champions in the early 90’s to the stacked 1998-99 roster that went undefeated in the ACC. The 2000-01 Blue Devils, led by consensus All-Americans Shane Battier and Jay Williams, rolled through the NCAA Tournament, winning six games by an average margin of 16.1 points.
Now here come the 2024-25 Blue Devils, who look ready not only to add to that history but stake their claim as the best Duke team ever. They are No. 1 on KenPom with an adjusted efficiency margin of +39.40. That is the highest mark of any team since the aforementioned ’98-99 Blue Devils. For comparison, last year’s UConn squad, which won its NCAA Tournament games by an average of 23.3 points, had a net rating of +36.43. In most seasons, KenPom’s No. 1 team is in the +30-34 range.
This is a team without a weakness. Auburn leads the country in adjusted offensive efficiency at 130.8, but Duke is not far behind at 129.2. Those are the two best offensive ratings since KenPom began tracking the metric in 1997. The Blue Devils also rank fourth in adjusted defensive efficiency (89.6), making them the only program in the top five in both categories. Duke is a consensus No. 1 seed in every NCAA Tournament mock bracket (including that of Hoops HQ’s Brad Wachtel) and would likely lock that up with a victory in its final regular season game on Saturday at rival North Carolina.
Those numbers are impressive, but for Cooper Flagg and his teammates, there is only one way to properly seal their place in history: Win a national championship.
That pursuit begins with the 6-foot-9 Flagg, who entered the season as the nation’s No. 1 recruit, the alpha in Duke’s top-ranked recruiting class, and who remains the presumptive No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA draft. Flagg has been superb from the first game, but especially so since going through extensive workouts at home over the Christmas break. From that point on, Flagg has averaged 21.7 points, 6.8 rebounds, 4.6 assists, 1.6 steals and 1.1 blocks while shooting 55.1 percent from the field and 47.0 percent from three. The do-it-all forward leads Duke in every major statistical category. Not only is he the frontrunner for the Wooden Award, Flagg currently has the highest KenPom Player of the Year rating (2.911) ever recorded (KenPom has been keeping the metric since 2011). After Flagg put up 16 points, 7 rebounds and 5 assists on Feb. 22 in a 110-67 thrashing of Illinois, the worst defeat in program history, Illini coach Brad Underwood agreed that Flagg is the best player in the country, adding that it is “not even close.”
And yet, like all great teams, Duke is far from a one-man show. Nor is it as young as many people make it out to be. Four of the key players are freshmen — Flagg, 6-foot-7 wing Kon Knueppel, 7-foot-2 center Khaman Maluach and 6-foot-6 guard Isaiah Evans — but the roster also has experience. Tyrese Proctor, a 6-foot-6 junior guard, is averaging 11.8 points and shooting 39.9 percent from deep, while his backcourt mate Sion James, a 6-foot-6 senior transfer from Tulane, provides versatility, hounding defense and floor spacing (42.6 percent on threes).
With the transfer portal and the final year of bonus seasons because of COVID, many contenders have older players. Two teams expected to be No. 1 seeds, Auburn and Houston, rank 26th and 42nd, respectively, in experience, per KenPom. The Blue Devils rank No. 131. That could work against them, but the blend of young and old has been potent. “Jon [Scheyer] did a really good job with roster construction,” Wake Forest head coach Steve Forbes said earlier this week. “You can’t just go sign a bunch of players that don’t fit.”
Another important ingredient in Duke’s dominance is its ability to share and protect the ball. The Blue Devils shoot a high percentage from the paint, behind the arc and the free throw line. They have the premier bucket getter in the country in Flagg, but Proctor, Knueppel (13.6 points per game) and Evans (7.9 points per game) have all proven capable of carrying the offense in spurts.
On the other end of the floor, Maluach and Maliq Brown, a 6-foot-9 junior forward who transferred from Syracuse, protect the rim as well as any frontcourt duo in America. Duke uses its size and length — it is the tallest team in Division I, per KenPom — to be disruptive. It has held opponents to just 61.1 points per game, which ranks sixth in the nation. Only one other Duke squad (2009-10) has been that solid defensively in the last 75 years.
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Beyond the numbers, this Duke team has a competitive edge that has been unrelenting, particularly in the last two months. “I’m just proud of the killer instinct. It’s not normal what these guys are doing,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said this week. “We don’t take it lightly and we don’t take it for granted. We know the job’s not done and it doesn’t entitle you to any more wins the rest of the season, so for us it’s full steam ahead.”
But aren’t all these gaudy stats inflated because Duke plays in a historically weak ACC? True, Duke’s strength of schedule is considerably worse than that of Auburn, Houston, Florida, Alabama and other contenders. But the Blue Devils haven’t just beaten their weaker conference opponents — they have dismantled them. Of their 18 league victories, nine have come by at least 25 points. During nonconference play, Duke knocked off two ranked opponents in Auburn, the outright SEC champion, and Arizona in Tucson. Its narrow losses to Kentucky and Kansas haven’t aged particularly well, but those were back in November and it was clear then that the team’s standout freshmen — primarily Flagg—were still adjusting to the college level. Flagg committed a pair of costly turnovers down the stretch against Kentucky and had just 13 points and five turnovers in 38 minutes against Kansas.
Even if this team doesn’t win a championship, it will have secured its place on the list of best Duke teams that fell short. It’s worth remembering that before finally reaching the mountaintop in 1991, the Blue Devils went to four Final Fours in a five-year span and came up empty-handed each time. The ’98-99 team looked untouchable until it met UConn in the national final and got upset 77-74. Hopes were similarly high in 2019 because of freshman phenom Zion Williamson, but top-seeded Duke lost 68–67 to Michigan State in the Elite Eight.
Duke does face an unusual challenge with the impending departure of Associate Head Coach Jai Lucas, who is the team’s de facto defensive coordinator and recently accepted the position of head coach at the University of Miami. Because of the need to recruit players out of the portal, which opens March 24, Lucas will leave the squad at the conclusion of the regular season.
That is an unwelcome development, but it’s one this group should be able to overcome. As long as Duke takes care of business at the Dean Dome, it will win the ACC outright and could end up ranked No. 1 in the final AP poll after Auburn lost to Texas A&M on Tuesday. Beyond that, everyone in this program knows that anything short of a trip to San Antonio would be a disappointment. If and when these Blue Devils reach that destination, they can set their sights on taking that final step and answering the ultimate question: Will this team cement its legacy as the best in Duke history? Or will it end the season wondering what could have been?
