Blue Chip Season

After blue chip basketball recruit Jayson Tatum's recent announcement to sign with Duke, many recruiting experts anticipated this meant fellow blue chippers Dennis Smith and Harry Giles would join Tatum in Durham.
Giles and Smith can certainly do so, but it would be a mistake.
The path through Duke to NBA stardom does not pan out often. Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner, JJ Reddick, Kyle Singler, Shane Battier and a handful of other all-time Duke (and ACC, for that matter) legends, have combined to average 62 points in their careers. But that's not the important point for Smith and Giles.
Duke, for as many players as it does send to mostly fruitless NBA careers, has done horrendously poorly in compiling NBA championships. Since Coach K has been at Duke, only three players have ever won NBA championships. North Carolina, as a comparison, just passed the 30 player mark this season when Harrison Barnes and James Michael McAdoo earned rings with the Warriors. But that's also not the point for Giles and Smith.
The real point for Giles and Smith to consider is what they want out of playing in college. Anything else anyone can name is all well and good, but I'd have to assume that each of these players has hopes of being drafted as high in the NBA draft as possible one day.
With that, the smarter bet for these two is to go somewhere besides Duke so they can more clearly stand out apart from Tatum and other top-level recruits who have signed with Duke already. Moreover, it might be smart for them to sign with North Carolina to not only have a chance to stand apart from other recruits, but have multiple opportunities to prove they are better than these other recruits. Playing with them at Duke makes that difficult.
Need an example: Jahlil Okafor was drafted in the top five this year. His teammates Justise Winslow and Tyus Jones slid down from their previous draft projections, thus costing them money. Having worked as a sports writer for 16 years and talking over and over to scout after scout, their number one question always is: Is Player B that good or is he being made to look good by Player A? Because of Okafor, Winslow and Jones weren't defended as rigorously as they could have been – which is helpful  for getting open shots. NBA scouts, evidently, thought Okafor was making life easier on his running mates and they weren't really as good as they seemed.
That's fine if the goal is to win in college. But is it?
There has been case after case of players playing at Cal or Oregon State, Creighton, Butler and so on, who have excelled despite being the central focus of a team's offense. They boosted their draft stock by not playing next to other top-level recruits.
So what of the case for North Carolina, then? Certainly UNC has no lack of top talent but they have something that Duke and Kentucky can't offer and that's opportunity.
Marcus Paige and Bryce Johnson are leaving after this season, not only opening up needed playing time for both Giles and Smith, but also voiding the "star" role on the team, which would allow the two to really showcase how good they are on their own while also having one other player to help take away some pressure.
What will further aid them at UNC, in the eyes of scouts, is Carolina's notoriously tough schedule. They play Duke, obviously, but almost always play teams like Kansas, Michigan State, Kentucky and other top-tier teams. It's easy for Giles and Smith, then, to not only show they are better than the top players at Duke but also better than every other player at every top program by giving them a chance to play them head to head.
So those are the facts staring these blue chip players in the face.
And it's not an argument to sway. The facts are simply facts. Risk losing money in the draft, get caught in whatever weird funk seems to haunt Duke players in the NBA and abandon hope of winning NBA championships, or make a smarter choice all the way around and choose a different school.