Duke Basketball: Joseph Girard III set to announce college choice Sunday

The Duke basketball coaches have an outside shot on Sunday to pick up their second commitment from a 2019 recruit.

Although he’s the lowest-ranked Duke basketball target from the 2019 class — No. 196 on the 247Sports Composite — there is one stat that jumps off the page and suggests that Joseph Girard III is a wildcard candidate to be a college star.

As a junior in high school, the three-star combo guard from Glen Falls, N.Y., averaged 50 points per game — no, that isn’t a typo — helping him earn the title as the 2018 Gatorade New York Boys Basketball Player of the Year. And despite the fact that his senior season has yet to start, he is already his state’s all-time leading scorer.

Sure, the 6-foot-1, 180-pound dual-sport athlete — he won a state championship as a starting quarterback — hails from a small town and did not face the same level of competition as other prospects across the country; regardless, 50 points per game would be impressive even if he was playing against middle schoolers.

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On Sunday at 7 p.m. at the Queensbury Hotel in Glen Falls, according to Adam Zagoria of Zagsblog.com, Girard will announce which program will have a chance to see firsthand if his natural scoring ability translates to the college level.

Back in June, the sharpshooter trimmed his list to six schools: Duke, Syracuse, Penn State, Boston College, Michigan, and Notre Dame.

Although he decided to take only two official visits — to Syracuse in June and to Boston College in August — he said, according to Ellis L. Williams of The Post Star, that he has taken unofficial visits to all six schools on his list and that his not taking an official visit to a school is not an indication that he won’t end up there.

Currently, 69 percent of the experts at 247Sports’ Crystal Ball predict he will choose Syracuse. However, Duke comes in second with 15 percent of the picks (before his official visit to Syracuse, Duke was considered the favorite).

If Girard goes against what the majority of experts predict by picking Duke, he will become the second pickup by coach Mike Krzyzewski and his staff for the 2019 class. Five-star small forward Wendell Moore announced on Monday that he will be a Blue Devil.

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