The Duke Blue Devils are coming off a two-loss week, so is it time to start worrying about their chances to make a deep run in March?
There may not be a program that has more name value in college basketball than Duke, which has a Hall of Fame coach in Mike Krzyzewski and enough talent to cut down the nets in March. There were signs early in this season Duke could be the team to beat, especially once the Blue Devils raced off to a 15-1 start, including winning streaks of six and nine games.
The Blue Devils crashed back to Earth last week, losing at Clemson and falling at home to Louisville to fall into second in the ACC standings behind the Cardinals. To be fair to Duke, Joey Baker, a key reserve, was out for the Clemson loss and the Blue Devils have been without key wing Wendell Moore Jr.for the past several weeks after he underwent hand surgery.
There are causes for concern regardless, including the fact this is a young team that isn’t going to be very battle-tested over the course of the season. The ACC is usually a strong league that sends at least eight teams to the NCAA Tournament, but the conference is having a down year, offering few opportunities for Duke to test themselves against truly elite competition.
Duke does have a few marquee victories on their resume early in the season, including a neutral site win over Kansas back in November and a true road win at Michigan State in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, but they have only one game left on their schedule against a team that’s currently ranked. That comes on Feb. 10, when Florida State comes to Cameron Indoor Stadium.
The good news for Blue Devils’ fans is their offense is elite, which will help come March. Duke’s biggest weakness a year ago was its inability to hit threes, and it cost them dearly in the NCAA Tournament, but this season the Blue Devils are knocking down 36 percent, which is the 60th best mark in the country.
There may not be a Zion Williamson-esque can’t miss talent either, but Duke is a deeper team this year. Duke’s rotation features 10 players who average at least 13.8 minutes per game, so there is less of an ability for the opposing defense to key on one player since everyone can knock down shots.
Freshman center Vernon Carey, Duke’s best player, is an efficiency beast, hitting over 60 percent of his field goal attempts and 50 percent of his 3-point tries while averaging 17.3 points per game and 8.4 rebounds per game. That kind of versatility opens up opportunities for the rest of the roster to make plays, which can make Duke tough to stop on any given night.
The biggest concern with Duke is the same one that has plagued them for the last several years, and that is their lack of experience. The Blue Devils are a heavily freshman-reliant team, and there hasn’t been a team to win it all in March without significant experience since Kentucky back in 2012.
The Clemson loss mostly falls into the lack of experience category since Duke was probably looking ahead to the matchup with Louisville, which is clearly the better team at the moment. The Blue Devils have the talent to win on any given night, but their young freshmen need to mature more over the last six weeks of the regular season if they hope to avoid another disappointing finish in March.
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