Duke Recap I

I'm going to do these recaps as often as possible during the ACC season, similar to what I was doing last year...

Duke 74, Clemson 53

College Basketball

(Chart from Statsheet. I can't find win probability charts, but this is pretty close. I assume they are using Bill James' formula to calculate safe leads, but I might be wrong.)

It was a disappointing, if not entirely unexpected result. The game wasn't really completely out of reach until the last three minutes, but I felt like the game was out of reach after Duke used a 6-0 run to push the lead to 61-44 with about 6:00 minutes left. That came after the final time Clemson threatened to cut the lead to single digits at 55-44 but couldn't take advantage of their chances.

Quick bullet points:

• The first half was an abject disaster on offense. I give Duke credit for playing some aggressive defense and really keeping us from getting good passing lanes in the halfcourt. But Clemson didn't help it's cause at all with poor spacing, poor ball-handling, poor decision-making around the basket, flat-shooting, bad bounces, and just about anything else they could possibly have screwed up. When you score 12 points in a half, I don't care how good the opposing defense is, you've done just about everything wrong.
• I give credit to the team for coming to life in the second half. Better execution in the halfcourt pushed up above 50 for the game. You can argue that Duke let up on defense, but I doubt they could have sustained the same pace for the entire game anyway.
• The offense found success against a tall team, which is encouraging. But even in the second half Clemson was plagued by poor-decision making and poor ball handling. Too many drives right into waiting Duke players, too many forced passes leading to turnovers.
• Only problem with the second half offensive output: the freshmen, aside from Devin Booker, were conspicuously absent despite foul trouble for Potter and Young. A pretty good indication of how Purnell feels about the play from Jennings, Johnson, and Hill, who all looked utterly lost in the first half and hurt the team with exceptionally bad shot selection and turnovers. On the other hand, Cameron Indoor is a pretty difficult place to expect a freshman to play his first conference game. Could spell trouble later in the season though if Purnell is forced to rotate through essentially seven guys: Smith, Young, Stitt, Potter, Grant, and the Bookers.
• The good news is I thought the defense did a good job throughout. They minimized the play of the Plumlee's underneath and made Duke beat them around the perimeter. Of course, with the improved play of Nolan Smith in addition to Scheyer and Singler they are perfectly capable of doing this, but I think it wasn't a bad strategy going in.
• We ended up losing by 20, but we essentially played them to a draw in the second half. I think this still gives us hope of pulling the upset in the friendlier confines of Littlejohn later in the month. Hopefully Johnson or Jennings start earning some playing time by then.

Tough way to start the ACC season. We get Boston College in the home opener this Saturday, though, so we shouldn't have to wait too long for our first ACC win.

Duke preview I: not last years' Dookies

Sunday, Jan. 3rd, Cameron Indoor, 7:45pm

Still working on the midseason review, but its become more involving than I initially thought. I'll hopefully have it up after next week, but I wanted to focus on the Duke game first...

Years of underperformance, selection committee overseeding, and media adoration have etched the image of Duke as an over-rated squad in the minds of college basketball fans across the country. This is largely justified, Duke hasn't been an elite squad for several years. However, I think we may be at the point where the pendulum has swung the other way; Duke has been labeled as "overrated" for so long that this is the year they might actually be underrated. After reading some of the chatter 'round the Clemson blogosphere (although the OP notably voices some caution), I think there may be the mistaken impression that after last year's performance Clemson walks into Cameron Indoor as, if not the favorite, the unquestioned equal of the Blue Devils. I aim to show you in this post this viewpoint is diametrically opposed to reality.

How is this year's Duke team so much better than the team that was beaten down in Littlejohn last season? Two things stand out after looking over the stats and also based on what I've seen from them this year. First, they stopped turning the ball over. I think this stems from two primary developments: 1) the graduation of Greg Paulus, who was a graduate student quarterback for a crappy Big East team for a while under the tutelage of one Rob Spence and 2) the remarkable improvement of Nolan Smith. Smith has gone from a guy who turned the ball over a poor 25.3% of his personal possessions as a freshmen, a semi-respectable 20.8% of the time as a sophomore, and now as a junior he's turning over the ball a microscopic 12.6% of the time. Wouldn't that have been nice to see from Demontez Stitt?

The second thing is the increase in height at Duke. I'm not talking about Zoubek, although he's more useful as a senior, particularly on both glasses. I'm talking more about the emergence of 6'10" sophomore Miles Plumlee and the arrival of this 6'10" freshman brother, Mason. Miles has been a beast on the offensive and defensive boards this season and a potent shot-blocker. On top of this, they've been getting quality defensive bench minutes from 6'10" freshman Ryan Kelly. Put it all together and in one season Duke has gone from 62nd in the country in average effective height to 9th.

These two developments have given Duke reliable ball-handling and a strong inside presence, two features noticeably lacking from recent incarnations of the team. It also spells big trouble for the Tigers, because both of these improvements cut into what made last season's game such a success. We forced turnovers left and right last season with our press; that's not likely to be repeated now. Trevor Booker dominated Duke inside last season; again, that's not likely to happen this time around. Throw in Clemson's general struggles last season with tall teams that feature a good defense and things start looking a little bleak.

There's still hope, though. While Duke runs out a good defense, it's not elite, ours is still probably a little better, and it certainly isn't at the level of a Florida State or Wake Forest. The Duke big men have probably been more valuable on offense than defense. I hope this means we still get some points in our half-court offense. We can also hope for some regression from Nolan Smith, I can believe the jump from 25 to 20 after a year of getting used to the college game, but that's an awful big jump in the third year.

All in all though, we're looking at long odds here. If Clemson can hold the margin of victory to under 10 points, I think its a moral victory and we can build on that to try and score the upset back home at Littlejohn later in the month. Or we can hope Nolan Smith melts down again in the presence of the press. GO TIGERS!!!!