Perimeter
RELOAD Guard-heavy Duke women embrace competitive cauldron By Jim Sumner
Photos Jon Gardiner Joanne P. McCallie’s Duke women’s basketball team ended last season shy of depth, ball-handling and perimeter shooting. A series of transfers and injuries left her with six ACC-quality players, enough to get Duke to the Sweet 16, where they fell to former ACC rival Maryland. Duke ended 23-11, the most losses since 1997 against a brutal schedule designed to be contested by a different team than actually showed up. Fast-forward seventh months and those concerns have been addressed by the nation’s top recruiting class, five-deep, all perimeter players. Freshmen Haley Gorecki, Crystal Primm and Faith Suggs are all ranked in the middle of the Top 100. Early returns suggest that the first two might be undervalued. Gorecki was the Illinois prep player of the year. She’s a 6-0 guard with a skill set and basketball IQ reminiscent of a young Georgia Schweitzer. Primm is a physical, 5-11 attack-first wing. The 6-1 Suggs is the most likely of the newcomers to play some forward. Kyra Lambert is a Top-10 prospect, a jet-quick 5-9 point guard whom McCallie compares to Jasmine Thomas. She says Lambert needs to learn how to do more than just use her speed. But she’s going to play early and often. That leaves Angela Salvadores, a 5-9 Spanish import who exploded into the limelight two summers ago when she torched the U.S. team for 40 points in the 2014 FIBA U17 title game. One national magazine picked Salvadores to be the national freshman of the year. McCallie has high praise.
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REBECCA GREENWELL