Insider Forecasts Next Duke Basketball Starting Five
Fourth-year Duke basketball head coach Jon Scheyer and his staff haven’t yet completed their roster construction for next season. Even so, most insiders view the 2025-26 Blue Devils as a top 10 bunch.
As of the update to the ROTHSTEIN 45 on Monday, national college basketball expert Jon Rothstein has Duke at No. 8 in the country, one notch above where the program sat two weeks ago but one spot below where the 2024-25 Blue Devils began their campaign before winning 35 games and finishing No. 3 after blowing a late lead to Houston at the Final Four in San Antonio.
Duke and No. 15 Louisville are the only two ACC teams in his top 25.
Rothstein projects the following Duke basketball starting five: rising junior guard Caleb Foster, sophomore guard Isaiah Evans, redshirt junior forward Cedric Coward (transfer from Washington State), freshman forward Cameron Boozer, and sophomore center Patrick Ngongba II.
Two of those projected starters, Evans and Coward, remain early draft entrants and are among the 75 invites to next week’s NBA Draft Combine in Chicago. So, there’s no guarantee they’ll be in Durham when the 2025-26 Duke basketball campaign tips off in early November.
The projected Blue Devil bench in Rothstein’s eyes consists of sophomore guard Darren Harris, senior forward Maliq Brown, freshman forward Nikolas Khamenia, and freshman guard Cayden Boozer.
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Of course, if Utah drops at least a couple of notches below the No. 1 overall pick, there’s still a chance the roster-developing franchise will wind up with a lottery talent out of Duke to pair with Kyle Filipowski. After all, one-and-dones Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach are both widely projected to be among the first 14 off the board at the 2025 NBA Draft in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on June 25.
