Duke Basketball: Complete Roster, Season Preview for 2015-16 Blue Devils

To paraphrase the Christian Laettner commercial that even Duke fans were downright sick of by the end of the 2015 NCAA tournament, the Blue Devils cannot just kick back and rest on their laurels after winning the national championship.

With the amount of talent on this roster and the amount of parity atop the preseason polls, there's no good reason Duke can't string together back-to-back titles.

Just don't expect to see very many familiar faces on the court. The Blue Devils lost Jahlil Okafor, Justise Winslow, Tyus Jones and Quinn Cook, leaving Amile Jefferson and Matt Jones as their highest-scoring returning players.

Like yesteryear, however, they'll be extremely reliant upon freshmen. Derryck Thornton will probably lead the team in minutes played. Luke Kennard and Chase Jeter could both be in the mix for starting jobs. And Brandon Ingram might play his way into the conversation for the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 NBA draft.

What's a reasonable expectation for how it will all come together?

We took a deep dive into Duke's 2015-16 roster to project who will be on the court most often, what the biggest X-factors will be and how well this team will serve as defending champs.

Brandon Ingram

Duke has four 5-star freshmen, as evaluated by 247Sports, but Ingram should be the best of the bunch, rated as the third-best incoming freshman in the entire country.

Because of his height, thin frame and ridiculous wingspan, Ingram will inevitably draw physical comparisons to Kevin Durant. Don't bet on him putting up the 25.8 points and 11.1 rebounds per game that KD posted in his one season with Texas, but Ingram can score from pretty much anywhere he wants and should be a very valuable asset on defense.

Derryck Thornton

When Ingram signed, it cemented Duke's status as a contender to repeat as national champions. But it was arguably even more important when Thornton reclassified and signed with the Blue Devils because they would have been desperately searching for an answer at point guard otherwise.

The scouting report on Thornton is that his vision and awareness are second to none, and while he hasn't displayed much in the way of three-point shooting, he's an excellent scorer from inside the arc. Considering Grayson Allen and Luke Kennard will handle more than the lion's share of the perimeter scoring, Thornton's projected skill set sounds like a pretty darn perfect fit on this team.

Luke Kennard

We'll see how much he actually gets to play in a crowded backcourt, but Kennard is probably the best scorer on this entire roster. He averaged 41 points per game as a junior and ended up scoring more career points in high school than LeBron James. If given the opportunity, he could be the next J.J. Redick.

Chase Jeter

Virtually nothing has been written about Jeter since he committed to Duke in August 2014, but he just might be the key to everything this season.

No one in their right mind is worried about the backcourt's ability to produce, but with Amile Jefferson, Marshall Plumlee and Sean Obi as the only other viable frontcourt options, Jeter should get a ton of minutes at the 5 for the Blue Devils. No one expects Jahlil Okafor production from him, but anything between early-career Brian Zoubek and late-career Mason Plumlee is on the table.

The Blue Devils only bring back four players who logged at least 20 minutes last season. Might as well touch on each of them here, in descending order of expected importance.

Grayson Allen

Long before he exploded in the Final Four and national championship game, it was a foregone conclusion that Allen would play a huge role for Duke this season. He was the only member of last year's recruiting class who didn't get to play as many minutes as he wanted, but his time would come. An excellent three-point shooter and effortless dunker, Allen should lead the team in scoring this year.

Amile Jefferson

Jefferson is the veteran power forward who rarely scores and always hustles. While Allen got hot late in the tournament, Jefferson played 52 minutes over the final three games, attempting one shot, blocking three and grabbing 18 rebounds. Because he couldn't care less about offensive touches, there should be plenty to go around for the backcourt when he's in the game.

Matt Jones

As Jon Rothstein of CBS Sports reported on Twitter last week, Jones has been getting reps at point guard in practice, preparing him for the role of super-sub in the backcourt. Like Jefferson, he's not a ball hog by any means. In fact, for someone who started the final 13 games of the season for the national champions, Jones was quite forgettable. But he was a solid shooter and one of the team's best defenders. If practice at the point results in an increase to his woeful career assist rate, he'll be a very important piece of this puzzle.

Marshall Plumlee

Will this finally be the year that he gets an expanded role, or will Plumlee remain a Tasmanian (Blue) Devil off the bench—unleashed for just a few minutes of chaos at several junctures of each game? Foul trouble and turnovers have plagued him for his entire career, but Plumlee is an insatiable offensive rebounder and a very capable shot-blocker who provides a positive spark more often than not. If nothing else, watching him fly around the court pumps up the Cameron Crazies.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear: We're all guessing.

Back in early June, Bryan Zarpentine of RantSports.com suggested a starting five of Derryck Thornton, Matt Jones, Brandon Ingram, Amile Jefferson and Chase Jeter.

Less than a month later, ESPN's Jeff Goodman went smaller with his projection by booting Jeter and inserting Grayson Allen at shooting guard.

In early May, before either of those guesses, David Aldridge of DukeReport.com proposed a lineup of Thornton, Allen, Ingram, Jefferson and Marshall Plumlee.

After Ingram signed, Chris Godfrey of BustingBrackets.com proposed four potential lineups for Duke, none of which match the aforementioned three nor contain Rice transfer Sean Obi.

Beyond Thornton as the starting point guard and Ingram starting somewhere, pretty much anything goes. There are at least two dozen perfectly viable combinations for Duke's opening day starting lineup, and only Mike Krzyzewski knows what it will be.

Here's our best guess at who will be out there for the opening tip against Siena.

Starting Lineup

PG: Derryck Thornton
SG: Grayson Allen
SF: Brandon Ingram
PF: Amile Jefferson
C: Chase Jeter

Primary Reserves: Matt Jones, Luke Kennard, Marshall Plumlee, Sean Obi

When Up By 30: Justin Robinson, Antonio Vrankovic, Brennan Besser, Nick Pagliuca

What Duke ultimately does will likely boil down to how big Ingram is willing to play.

If the 6'9" wing decides to be second-half-of-the-season Justise Winslow by averaging 14.7 points and 8.6 rebounds per game while taking seven out of every nine field-goal attempts from inside the arc, then, by all means, bump either Jones or Kennard into the starting lineup in place of Jefferson.

If Ingram elects to follow in the footsteps of Rodney Hood by averaging less than five rebounds per 40 minutes and taking more than 40 percent of his shots from three-point range, Coach K will have to play him at small forward with two other guys in the frontcourt, because there isn't a big man on this roster dominant enough to be the sole provider in the paint.

Let's hope he puts his size to his advantage, though, because a primary six-man rotation of Thornton, Allen, Jones, Ingram, Jeter and Kennard is arguably the highest concentration of talent among the many options.

Sean Obi

Some coaches live and die on the transfer market, but Mike Krzyzewski hasn't made much of a habit of bringing in strays. In fact, in the past decade, he has only signed three transfers: Seth Curry (Liberty), Rodney Hood (Mississippi State) and Obi (Rice).

All three played a freshman season elsewhere before coming to Duke and sitting out a season. The first two panned out quite nicely. Thanks in part to Kyrie Irving's toe injury, Curry averaged 25.0 minutes per game in his first season at Duke, shooting 43.5 percent from three-point range. Hood played just one season with the Blue Devils before jumping to the NBA, but he put up 16.1 points per game while logging a team-high 1,150 minutes.

If the past is any indication of the present/future, Coach K doesn't add guys just to let them go to waste on the bench. Obi might not start right away, but you have to think that a 265-pound forward who averaged 11.4 points and 9.3 rebounds per game two seasons ago will get plenty of opportunities to show he deserves a big piece of the frontcourt pie.

As you may have noticed on the previous slide, who starts at center for Duke is the biggest shoulder shrug of them all. Chase Jeter will probably get the first crack at it, but don't be surprised if Obi logs at least 20 minutes per game by the start of ACC play.

(In)experience

Krzyzewski has obviously proven capable of winning with freshmen, but one cannot possibly overstate the importance of senior Quinn Cook on last year's championship team. The combo guard finished his career with more than 4,000 minutes played, most of them with a swagger that exuded leadership and confidence.

The four aforementioned key returners on this year's roster have combined for just 4,115 collegiate minutes.

If they were playing with the likes of Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow, who were already NBA-ready and had experience playing together before college, there wouldn't be much cause for concern.

But who stands out as the veteran leader on this freshman-heavy team? Which player serves as the coach on the court, bringing things back together and keeping everyone calm when the going gets tough? Is Derryck Thornton ready for that responsibility? Is anyone else capable of it?

Best-Case Scenario

Gee, I wonder what the best-case scenario might be for a team that has won two of the past six national championships and has earned no worse than a No. 3 seed in each of the past eight tournaments?

This is Duke we're talking about.

If things go even remotely according to plan, it's at least 27 wins in a very difficult ACC, resulting in a spot on the top two seed lines and a tournament path that begins with two games in Raleigh, North Carolina.

If things really go according to plan, Brandon Ingram finishes top five in the Wooden Award vote while the Blue Devils win both the ACC regular-season and conference tournament titles—they haven't won either since 2011. They earn the No. 1 overall seed and cruise to the Final Four before gleefully stomping both Kentucky and Maryland on the biggest stage.

The absolute best-case scenario, though, is everything in the previous paragraph happening AND North Carolina getting banned from the postseason because of the Wainstein Report.

Worst-Case Scenario

I always hate projecting worst-case scenarios because it's never anything close to the actual worst-case scenario. That would be some lethal combination of horrible injuries to star players, a scandal involving Coach K and the entire campus literally burning to the ground.

But let's pretend that Duke's worst nightmare is freshmen failing to live up to the hype, Grayson Allen struggling in a lead role and Florida State and Miami really excelling this season while Duke finishes in sixth place in the ACC and suffers at least 12 losses for the first time since 1995-96. The Blue Devils still make the tournament, but for the first time in Krzyzewski's career, he's an underdog in the first round as a No. 9 seed or worse.

Duke is going to be very good. That isn't so much a prediction as it is a fact with nearly two decades' worth of evidence. The Blue Devils have finished in the top nine of the AP Top 25 in 18 of the past 19 seasons.

If you're penciling in Wisconsin for a top-four finish in the Big Ten just because that's what Bo Ryan always does, it'd be pretty hypocritical of you to not also proclaim Duke as one of the 10 best teams in the country, per usual.

But let's get unnecessarily specific with this prediction, shall we?

One to-be-determined member of the backcourt rotation will be a major disappointment this year, but with four guards and a fifth perimeter player in Brandon Ingram who are all capable of incredible things, the backcourt as a whole will be better than fine.

As previously mentioned, Chase Jeter will determine Duke's fate. He doesn't need to be an All-American for Duke to be a Final Four-caliber team, but he does need to be able to compete with Kennedy Meeks, Mike Tobey, Chinanu Onuaku, Tonye Jekiri, Zach Auguste and others. Otherwise, Duke has a world-class perimeter game and no interior prowess, reminiscent of both the 2014-15 Indiana Hoosiers and the Duke team that lost to Mercer in 2014.

Duke finishes in a tie for second place in the ACC standings before an early exit in the ACC tournament at the hands of a Notre Dame or Pittsburgh squad desperate to boost its tournament seed.

The Blue Devils ultimately end up as the No. 7 overall seed (aka one of the No. 2 seeds) but won't repeat as national champions. The possibility of it happening will be an incessant topic of discussion right up until their elimination in the second weekend of the 2016 NCAA tournament.

Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @kerrancejames.