Much debate has been made of this year’s class of talented freshmen. Syracuse’s Tyler Ennis and Duke’s Jabari Parker are two of them – arguably the two best – and Daily Orange beat writers Stephen Bailey and David Wilson make their respective arguments for the two rookies. See Stephen’s case for Ennis here.

A week of conference play had gone by and something had gone horribly wrong for Duke.

The Atlantic Coast Conference’s premier team was somehow only 1-2. Jabari Parker, its superstar freshman — the one who topped Wooden Award watch lists just weeks earlier — had suddenly become human.

Maybe he was taking bad shots. Maybe he wasn’t multi-dimensional enough. Maybe his pedestrian defense had come back to haunt him — the basketball gods don’t like stuff like that.

While the rest of the nation was relishing in the Blue Devils’ struggles, the 18-year-old forward would be tasked with righting the fast-sinking ship.

Duke topped Virginia in its next game to pull to .500 without much help from Parker, but it wasn’t a particularly impressive Blue Devil performance. Then North Carolina State came to town.

Everything that Parker had failed to do well during the first four games of ACC play, he fixed against the Wolfpack. He scored 23 points, his most in 2014. He shot 50 percent from the field and drilled both of his 3-point attempts. He grabbed seven rebounds. He even played a little bit of defense, and Duke won 95-60.

“Changing habits is not easy, especially when you’re so successful with those other habits,” Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski said after the game. “Today he really attacked.”

Passiveness plagued his game for a couple of weeks, but when he’s playing active there’s no other freshman like him. He plays with the confidence of a senior and the skill of an NBA player. Even with Tyler Ennis, Joel Embiid, Andrew Wiggins and Julius Randle in this freshman class, Parker has consistently stood above the rest.

He already outperformed Embiid and Wiggins with 27 points in a loss back in November, and Saturday is another prime opportunity to prove his rookie superiority. No. 17 Duke (17-4, 6-2 ACC) might not beat No. 2 Syracuse (20-0, 7-0) when they square off at 6:30 p.m. in the Carrier Dome, but with another chance against a star freshman in front of a national audience, he’ll remind everyone why he, and not Ennis, was the one with all the hype.

Ennis has snatched some of those headlines away for two reasons. The first is how he seems to just keep getting better all season long.

To put it in football terms, because the point guard position is so often compared to quarterback, at the beginning of the year he was a “game manager.”

Now he’s also the closer.

Parker’s been that all season long. Only twice this year has he been held to single digits, and never fewer than seven. Ennis has scored in single figures four times and was even shut out in 32 minutes against Eastern Michigan on New Year’s Eve.

“Jabari’s one of the best players in the country,” Ennis said after the Orange’s 67-57 win against Wake Forest on Wednesday. “We’ll have to key in on him because he gets them going.”

The second is Ennis’ clutch play. During SU’s win against the Demon Deacons, Ennis scored just two points in the first half and trailed during the second. The guard awoke and finished with 18.

“I’ve been hearing real good things about him,” Parker said during the week. “He’s one of the big playmakers for their team.”

The Blue Devils have largely avoided the need for Parker’s clutch play.

Only three of Duke’s wins have come by single digits. He was benched for the end of the Blue Devils’ narrow loss to Notre Dame, but his consistent play has outweighed his relative deficiencies in the clutch.

There’s good reasoning behind all the Ennis praise — a point guard is more valuable than a small forward — but almost every number points in Parker’s favor. He’s averaging 18.8 points to Ennis’ 12.3 and grabbing more than eight boards per game. He’s even shooting a higher percentage than Ennis despite the second highest usage (32.6) in the conference.

For comparison’s sake, Ennis’ usage rate (20) ranks fourth on his own team among players who have played in at least 13 games. C.J. Fair’s 27.6 is eighth in the ACC.

Their roles are different, and Ennis’ value is incredible to the Orange, but Parker’s game should be a familiar sight for Syracuse fans. There have been better freshmen than Carmelo Anthony, but Parker embraces comparisons to the one-and-done who brought SU its only national championship.

After Saturday, maybe Orange fans will see that, too.

David Wilson is a staff writer for The Daily Orange, where his column appears occasionally. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @DBWilson2.

Published on January 31, 2014 at 5:01 am