The Duke Men’s Basketball team will tip off the 2019 exhibition season on Saturday night against reigning Division II national champion Northwest Missouri State.

2019-2020 will be yet another season in which the Blue Devils face a number of questions all over the roster after the lion's share of the previous year's production departed the program for the NBA Draft.

Gone are Zion Williamson, RJ Barrett, Cam Reddish, and Marques Bolden, a quartet which accounted for 59.9 points and 22.9 rebounds per contest. In their place are four newcomers who comprise the nation's No. 3 recruiting class.

Saturday night's game against the Bearcats will be the first time Vernon Carey, Matthew Hurt, Cassius Stanley, and Wendell Moore will have faced college competition, and how they perform - both Saturday and throughout the season - will go a long way to determining this team's ceiling. And it's floor.

The four freshman, along with the rest of the roster, will be led by sophomore point guard Tre Jones who earned a spot on the Preseason All-ACC First team. Carey was named to the Preseason All-ACC Second Team.

It's a core that most programs would envy, and it's one that the team at DraftKings.com believes will be successful. On Friday the site posted a list of projected college basketball regular-season win totals with Duke projected to finish the year with the third most victories.

According to ESPN which first reported the information, Gonzaga's win total for the regular season opened at 27.5 while Duke checked in at 25.5 wins. The total does not include projected either conference or NCAA Tournament victories.

Given Duke's non-conference schedule, a 25.5 win total would set the projected loss total at 5.5. Considering that and the likelihood of being an underdog to Kansas and Michigan State during the regular season, the oddsmakers appear to project Duke to post something close to a 16 or 17 win ACC regular season mark. Such a win total would be in line to place the Blue Devils on top of the regular season standings for the first time since the 2010 season.

Over the past several seasons Duke has relied heavily on elite, one and done freshmen and while it has produced teams with high ceilings, there have been patches of inconsistency due to injury and adjustment as the young talent acclimated to the rigors of college basketball. Meanwhile, more experience teams have found ways to out-pace the arguably more talented, but less consistent Blue Devils.

This season, however, Coach Krzyzewski says he believes his team has a more traditional makeup, and perhaps that's what the oddsmakers are banking on.

“We have players from all classes that can play, including a graduate student, which we don’t usually have," said the head coach following the Countdown to Craziness scrimmage event. "As a result, everyone feels like they’ve got a chance and they’re working at it, and so they come and compete everyday and they’re making each other better. Somedays some guys look better than others, and then other days those guys look better and so that’s more of an old-fashioned type of situation and even for our practices we haven’t declared like these are the five white shirts, we mix and match them, we tell them like even in the game, you got someone who’s playing well, they’re going to play more. It’s kind of refreshing and I like it and we’ll see how it translates into wins and losses, especially in our league, our league is wide open, we don’t have the veteran teams."

Last season Duke posted a 32-6 overall record en route to a second consecutive appearance in the NCAA Tournament's Elite Eight round.