Top four takeaways from Duke basketball win over Kansas

Third takeaway: I was wrong about Duke freshmen Cassius Stanley and Wendell Moore

Coming into the year I was very high on Duke basketball freshman small forward Wendell Moore and thought he would be one of the best players on the team. It’s still early and he has plenty of time to become that player — and I wouldn’t be surprised if he did — but he has really struggled and doesn’t look quite ready through two exhibition games and Tuesday night.

Decision-making was the North Carolina native’s biggest issue against Kansas. Moore took several bad shots, dribbled himself into no man’s land and committed a couple of turnovers after leaving his feet to pass.

Moore has a ton of potential so he’s just going to need to play through the growing pains. I’m not giving up on him yet.

I didn’t expect much from Cassius Stanley this year because freshmen ranked where he was ranked out of high school — No. 37 on the 247Sports 2019 Composite — just haven’t had huge impacts their first years at Duke.

Again, it’s early, but so far Stanley looks exactly like I thought Moore would be. Against Kansas, the shooting guard out of Los Angeles didn’t take bad shots, played good defense and made smart decisions with the ball,

Oh, and he does stuff like this:

But Stanley did commit four turnovers. A couple of those turnovers resulted from the 20-year-old just losing the ball while dribbling, so he does need to tighten up his handle a little bit.

Now, let’s take a look at the fourth and final observation from the Blue Devils’ scrappy season debut…