Has Duje Dukan Earned A Second Look?

While a lot of Sacramento Kings fans were focused on watching Willie Trill Cauley-Stein or David Stockton at the NBA Summer League, I felt like one of (if not the) most impressive player for the Kings Summer League squad was former Wisconsin forward Duje Dukan.

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Dukan was statistically very impressive during the normally sloppy style of play seen in Las Vegas for Summer League–he showed how seriously the Wisconsin Badgers are about ball movement and control, and avoiding wasting possessions with turnovers.

He averaged just 0.8 turnovers in exactly 18 minutes per game with Sacramento, which goes to show how careful Dukan is with the ball on offense. He was not afraid to let it fly when he had a shot, however. He took over four three-point shots per game, and made 41 percent of those shots.

That percentage is actually weighed down by a poor showing against the Denver Nuggets in which Dukan missed all three three-pointers he took–if you throw out that game, he shot 58.8 percent from long-range, which is obviously a great and unfortunately unsustainable percentage.

It’s a bit hard to tell if that number was more due to luck or improvement on Dukan’s part seeing as in his final season with the Badgers he shot just 32 percent on almost 100 three-point attempts, but his scorching Summer League shooting makes him interesting at the very least.

Dukan’s scoring was also impressive considering his mere 18 minutes per game: he averaged over nine points per game on a solid 44 percent shooting from the field. The 6’10” forward also managed to snag 2.4 rebounds in those limited minutes, although he’s clearly more of an outside threat than a rebounder or paint presence.

Still though, the fact that over four of his five games Dukan was shooting nearly 60 percent from deep is pretty damn impressive. Three-point shooting is what determined the great teams in the NBA last season, and I doubt that small-ball trend is going to change anytime soon.

Adding a guy like Duje Dukan who will cost virtually nothing to the roster is a good idea for Vlade Divac and the Sacramento Kings. The best part is that they don’t even have to make that decision quite yet, as they still have training camp to evaluate borderline players such as Dukan and Stockton.

Training camp rosters will not be announced for a few months yet, but I would be pretty surprised to see Sacramento not bring in Dukan for an extended look in September. His Summer League shooting from beyond the arc was honestly fantastic, and at this point in the NBA a talented, cheap stretch four is a valuable commodity indeed.

Has Duje Dukan Earned A Second Look?

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