Former Duke basketball guard should be case study for Jeremy Roach

Jeremy Roach can learn from the growth of Duke basketball legend Tre Jones.

By the numbers, point guards Jeremy Roach and Tre Jones were almost identical as Duke basketball freshmen. They were decent. Good, not great. Roach averaged 8.7 points per game last season, and his predecessor chipped in 9.4 points per game in 2018-19.

Neither is atypical from a fresh-faced, first-year lead guard under head coach Mike Krzyzewski. And once you consider the surrounding talent on an annual basis, it becomes clearer: Running the point at Duke is traditionally more democratic than dictatorial.

Blue Devil point guards are the Pete Rose’s of college hoops, the table-setters for the rest of the lineup, the Diet John Stockton’s donning Duke blue.

Think Tom Brady circa 2001.

Roach and Jones were risk-averse because, well, they needed to be; it was as much to do with them as their teammates given the on-court struggles each encountered early. They hovered around 30 percent from the 3-point range, and neither seemed to gain confidence in his jump shot.

But Jones, the 2019-20 ACC Player of the Year, took a likely-to-few leap — mainly to those on the periphery — in his second season and should be the case study for Roach, the Blue Devils’ soon-to-be sophomore guard who showed enough promise as a freshman to be more reliable as a returning starter for Krzyzewski and Co.

An inconsistent Duke basketball freshman

Following Tre Jones in the No. 3 Duke basketball jersey, Jeremy Roach scored 10-plus points six times in the first nine games of the season. Shortly after, he hit the fatigued freshman wall, the now-cliché, and reached that mark only six more times the rest of the year.

In back-to-back conference games early in the calendar against Louisville and Georgia Tech, Roach failed to score a point, attempting six total shots for a group that was short on ammunition.

He was too reluctant. Top-flight programs feature everything but from the point guard position, leaving the Blue Devils with almost every reason to believe they are, once again, contenders nationally in 2021-22.

Expectations as a Duke basketball sophomore

Duke basketball’s return-to-the-top talk is contingent on Jeremy Roach’s improvement this offseason. No exceptions, one caveat: It will hardly be noticeable numbers-wise.

Unlike Tre Jones’ sophomore campaign, Roach will likely not average over 16 points per game, nor be the sole distributor, nor be the go-to on-ball defender, but he has the ability to be all of those to an extent. To what extent, though, will dictate the capabilities of a team that will rely heavily on freshmen scoring.

ALSO READ: Predicting Duke’s starting lineup next season

The safe bet is for the Blue Devils’ top recruit and five-star freshman Paolo Banchero to lead the team in scoring. Accompanying him at Duke are fellow 2021 McDonald’s All-Americans AJ Griffin and Trevor Keels, making the proverbial pie smaller by the bite for Roach and the other returning players.

Consequently, efficiency is how Roach’s game should be measured.

As a freshman, he had a Player Efficiency Rating of 11.7, while Jones registered 15.4 in his first year as a Blue Devil. Granted, one team featured two first-team All-Americans in Zion Williamson and RJ Barrett, and one failed to make the NCAA Tournament. Apples-to-oranges, sure, but how else does a team make a deep run into March if not for high-value, orderly guard play?

Take Baylor and Gonzaga, the two heavyweights of the most recent Final Four. As their lead guards last season, Jared Butler and Jalen Suggs had a PER of at least 22, twice that of Roach as a freshman, and each had a usage rate of at least 24 percent, compared to Roach at 17.9 percent on a less-than-adequate Duke basketball team.

In other words, Krzyzewski would have had no issue putting the ball in his hands more, but the reward was not greatly enhancing the team’s performance.

That is the point.

Jones’ PER jumped from 15.4 to 21.2 from year one to two at Duke, and his usage rate increased from 15.1 to 24 percent, further evidence of his effectiveness and the need for Roach to mimic the now-San Antonio Spur, even if he spares an increase in usage rate.

As a sophomore, Roach could make the jump to, say, a 20 percent usage rate and a PER of 20, and that would assure his recognition as a high-level point guard.

But let us assume his usage rate remains where it stood in his initial college season and his PER nearly doubles. What that would mean for the young-ish Blue Devils is this: Jeremy Roach would affect the game on limited possessions, but also be the ball-in-his-hands guy late in games given improved efficiency numbers.

How does that happen though, the more-than-gradual jump from a guard that, by the numbers, was underwhelming even with limited responsibility?

Study Tre Jones, a lot.