Jordan Brand Classic Roster Announced

The roster for the Jordan Brand Classic has been announced and Duke is well represented: Dereck Lively, Dariq Whitehead and Kyle Filipowski are all going to be there.

Filipowski will be on the Home team while future teammates Whitehead and Lively will represent the Away team.

Not invited: Mark Mitchell, Christian Reeves and Jaden Schutt.

Schutt and Reeves were unlikely to be invited. Both have significant upside but neither are seen as a Five Star which is probably the cutoff.

Mitchell generally is but there are a lot of good players to choose from.

And we don’t know enough to do anything but speculate here, but we’d guess there is a bias towards Nike schools and probably Nike AAU programs too.

The funny thing about watching young players develop is that they do it in different ways. Dennis Rodman was homeless and 6-2 before he grew and found a place to play. Duke didn’t recruit Steph Curry because they thought he was too small. And some guys look dominant in high school because they matured early but never get too much better as other players catch up and pass them.

So it’s entirely possible that Reeves and Schutt could eventually emerge as the best players in this class.