Duke Basketball: Early look at Blue Devils potential roster for 2020-21 season

Midway through February and one could say that the Duke Basketball 2019-20 season is just getting underway as well, but it’s never too early to look ahead to next season.

Duke basketball currently sits at 21-3 with an 11-2 record against ACC opponents. For the most part, a 21-3 record could be exactly where some would put them at this point when the season started, but the teams Duke has lost to would NOT have been the ones most would’ve said.

That’s great and all, but at the end of the day what does this mean for Duke going into the 2020-21 season? For the first time since the 2013 NBA Draft, Duke might not have a top-three pick this year and for the first time since that same year, the Blue Devils might not even have a lottery pick.

So once again, what does this mean for next year’s team? What this means is that for the first time in what feels like forever, Duke might have a strong roster filled with returning players.

Every year there’s a new flock of freshmen that migrates to Durham that enters as the old flocks leaves and in 2020-21 there’s a new flock coming in, but the old flock might still be there.

The question, however, is how many players from the 2019-20 team stay? That’s a question we won’t get answers to anytime soon, but we can make some educated guesses.

Whoever decides to stay in Durham for another season will do so with the addition of three McDonald’s All-American’s in Jeremy Roach, DJ Steward and Mark Williams, plus two more players in Jalen Johnson who would’ve been a McDonald’s All-American had he stayed at IMG and then a MCDAAG snub in Jaemyn Brakefield, plus Henry Coleman III.

The 2020 Duke recruiting class sits behind only Kentucky for the best class in the nation. With six players ranked in the top-50, it’s hard to have a much better class.

So without further ado, here is a preview of who might be staying, who might be leaving and how the 2020-21 Duke basketball roster shakes out.