Breaking News: Duke to release Humphries from LOI

Looks like Duke is going to release Kris Humphries from his letter of intent to sign with Minnesota. This will be a huge loss but to be honest our roster is stacked anyway and he would have been fighting for playing time. Looks like he will be one and done anyway as he wants to impress pro scouts fast and enter the NBA (which he considered right out of HS).

Anyway good luck to him at Minnesota.

 

I'd agree with you on this. I was surprised the guy signed there in the first place. Duke has some depth in the paint anyway with Thompson, Randolph, Williams and Horvath.

If I was Lee Melchionni - I'd start looking around too. I don't see him in there in front of Deng for many minutes at all and Randolph might see SF minutes too eventually.

 

I think Melchionni is more realistic. He loves Duke and just wants to contribute in any way he can. He realizes he isn't a pro talent.

 

Not surprised at all. Good luck to him. I expected to hear that he had declared for the draft.

 

guess that officially gives fsu the best recruiting class in the acc.

 

You are correct Sir.

 

Great article from DBR about this situation:

Now that Duke and Kris Humphries have parted ways, it's a good time to ask: what the heck just happened?

In a nutshell, if you want to boil it down to the most basic things, it's this: Kris Humphries, and his father, William, are more focused on the level after the next level than Duke is. Put more bluntly, while Duke and Coach K have supported players who want to leave early for the NBA and who are ready, including Elton Brand, Jason Williams, Carlos Boozer, and Mike Dunleavy, the Humphries were so focused on The League that Duke amounted to a pit stop, possibly a one-lap race.

If it turns out that it was Duke who said no, then we're immensely proud of the basketball program. Kris Humphries is a talented kid who might well have started. He's big, strong, he can shoot, and knows the game. He's also still a juvenile, he learned his craft in Minnesota, not exactly a basketball hotbed (read: no huge competition), and he has proven exactly nothing so far against collegiate competition, let alone pro standards.

He's a blank check in some respects. Not to say he couldn't be great, because he could. But so far he's proved nothing.

The way we see it, and this is opinion, not factual insight, but we're guessing either the Humphries said they wanted certain guarantees about playing time, in order to maximize his pro potential, or that they explicitly said that Kris would only be at Duke for one year.

That wouldn't surprise us since there was such a buzz this spring about Humphries possibly applying for the draft. We really didn't take it seriously because, come on, how could you? Who could be that foolish? This is a kid who has some upside, without question, but is he a better player than Creighton's Kyle Korver? Korver is a superb player, but he's projected as a late second-round pick. Korver would kill Humphries at this point in his career.

Even among the high school players applying this year, Humphries had little chance of moving ahead of them. LeBron? C'mon. Travis Outlaw? Ndubi Ebi? James Lang? Kendrick Perkins? The Humphries had sense enough to realize - at least we think they did - that Kris would have a disastrous draft this season.

So what happened? Were they maneuvering for next year? Did they think they had Coach K over a barrel?

We do know that Coach K, having heard the rumors, flew up to Minnesota to ask in person a couple of weeks ago. Obviously we don't know what happened there, and we don't know what led to Monday's announcement, but we would bet our bottom dollar on this: Mike Krzyewski is not going to change the way Duke does things in order to help Kris Humphries get to the NBA faster.

If it turns out that the Humphries made specific demands about playing time, or guarantees about Kris's role at Duke, or said that he would definitely be leaving after his freshman year, then what's the point of coming in the first place? And what does that do to the rest of the team to know that this guy is playing for the scouts as a freshman? Aside from probably really pissing off Shelden Williams, Shavlik Randolph, Michael Thompson and Luol Deng, Krzyewski would have to employ a significant double standard, and that would be suicide for his team.

Finally, a word about basketball fathers in general. Look, like you, if you have kids, we want our kids to be successful and wealthy. We want postcards from Rio and the Riviera and grandkids who speak several languages. Would we let our kids join a rock tour at 17 if they were promised millions? Hell, no. Well, the NBA is not much different.

Aside from the basketball, there is a lot of baggage that goes with the NBA life, including shocking levels of child support, sexually transmitted diseases, using women like tissue paper, groupies, leaches, rip-off artists, hangers-on, lots of drinking, and other serious problems. In general, while the pay is astonishing, it's a coarse and often disgusting way of life, and it tends to corrupt people in bad ways.

That's not to say it gets to everyone - John Stockton was a guy who was totally focused on his job and, apparently, family as well. At one public event, someone made a joke about how all the former ballplayers present had had tons of women. Bob Cousy made it a point to seek the guy out and say - not me, that he had never been with anyone but his wife. A.C. Greene was often ridiculed for his long-held virginity, but he kept to his principles.

Then there's Tim Duncan, David Robinson, George Lynch, who we have always admired since his days at UNC, Shane Battier, Alan Henderson, Juan Dixon, all top-flight people.
We're not saying that Kris isn't of that caliber, because frankly, we don't know what his character is like. But what we do know is that he's a kid, and his dad seems to think that the cash he could get in the pros is worth whatever innocence his son retains. That's their choice, and that's as it should be. And we'll certainly wish him well as he takes his leave. But for the life of us, we cannot understand how a father - or a mother, uncle, or grandparent for that matter - can focus so intensely on money when the issue is not financial security but the character and integrity of their child. Everyone says that you can't turn down that kind of money, and in some cases, yeah, that's true, particularly if you're dirt poor one day and loaded the next. But really, aside from the dream of playing against the best, and being wealthy, how does the NBA help your child to grow up? Basically by smacking him around, that's how. If you strip away the money, in a million years, you'd never let your 17-year-old hang out with people like Sean Kemp, Jason Williams (of Memphis), Dennis Rodman, Ron Artest, George Karl, Joseph Forte, Anthony Mason, Latrell Sprewell, or Rasheed Wallace. Never.

At the end of it all, to us, when you look at the world you are sending your kid into, and you know that it's full of craziness, sexual predators, and people who are waiting to take ruthless advantage of your son in every other way possible, well, to us the question is really simple: how much will it take for you to sell out your child? And why is the line so damned, depressingly long?

 

I sure hope K did everything he could to help this kid, since it doesn't appear he is getting that from his dad.

 

I'm not sure I know what you mean but the more I think about this the more I think this was a very classy move by Coach K and Duke. The kid basically screwed them at the last second. Duke will have an open slot next yr - but to decommit at the last second does hurt. Duke did something that some schools wouldn't have done. Bravo Devils.

 

Did dook do this for the kid or did they do it because they were worried the kid would only be around one year?