Duke Basketball: Limited practices start Monday with Tre Jones included

The Duke basketball team is allowed to start practicing again with its coaches, but injuries will not allow two Blue Devils to participate.

The good news is that freshman Tre Jones is healthy enough to join his fellow Duke basketball players on the court when limited practices — four hours a week — begin on Monday. The bad news is that freshman Cam Reddish and sophomore Alex O’Connell are not ready to participate.

Jones and Reddish, both five-star prospects out of high school, did not see any action during Duke’s three-game Canada Tour in August while nursing injuries; O’Connell had only played a few minutes in the opening game when an elbow connected with his eye socket, leading to surgery on Aug. 23.

So while the coaches will have a chance to provide instructions to the team’s likely starting point guard, Jones, and watch how he executes them with teammates — most of his teammates, anyways — they will still have to wait until at least the end of September to see what it looks like to have a fully healthy squad practicing together.

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Duke assistant coach Nate James told The News & Observer’s Steve Wiseman that Jones, who has been battling a hip injury, is now able to “go 100 percent.”

Conversely, though, James said that Reddish still “has to take care of this injury” and is not likely to participate in the workouts — the full practice schedule does not start until Sept. 25.

And “this injury” of Reddish — having to do with his groin — is limiting the 6-foot-8 small forward more than Duke basketball fans might have originally thought.

While many Duke fans do happen to be doctors, even the ones who are not are all too familiar with the recent trend of coaches being extra cautious when it comes to the health of one-and-done players in Durham.

And that extra caution has often kept Dukies having to wait until months after the regular season begins to see the full lineup of each season’s highly touted freshmen.

Let’s hope that Reddish’s story at Duke isn’t as disappointing as the time Harry Giles spent on campus. Giles, who was recovering from a slew of knee troubles when he arrived in Durham in 2016, did not see any game action with the Blue Devils until the end of December in his one-and-only season in college.

And even when Giles did return, he was not nearly as effective as his top-rated status in high school advertised that he would be (he averaged just 3.9 points and 3.8 rebounds).

But Reddish is not Giles. And his injuries are not the same as those of Giles. Therefore, there may be no reason to worry.

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As for Jones, he is almost just like a former Dukie — his older brother, Tyus, led the Blue Devils to a fifth national championship in 2015. And that means Duke fans have plenty of reasons to be excited that the youngest Jones brother appears to no longer have anything holding him back.

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