MBB: Duke 72, Fla St 88 Post-Game Thread

[tbyers11]

Honestly, I admit I am sometimes hard on our team this year. I, like many others, was expecting so much more. I know the injuries threw us behind as far as being a cohesive unit. But we should be coming around, and we're not. The thing with Grayson wasn't helpful either.
I know we have the talent, some of the best in the land, and I believe that's why many of us are so frustrated.
At times we look awesome (Ga Tech) and other times we look pitiful (VaTech, FSU). It's like we're watching two different teams out there.

Somebody said at the end of November as Tatum, Bolden, and Giles were nearing return from their injuries that the November version of Duke playing basically 6 players (Amile, Matt, Luke, Grayson, Frank, and Chase) in close games would be better than the December/January version of Duke. It was largely a veteran core that, particularly on the defensive end, had much more cohesion. However as we saw last year a core of six players a bit short on interior muscle is not likely to maintain a high level of play throughout an entire season and likely wouldn't be a true Final Four candidate. However, to reach our full March capabilities we would have to go through an adjustment/growing period that might be a bit tricky as we incorporate the 3 freshman. Coach K said that December would be like October.

Now this line of reasoning did not even remotely account for 3 huge factors to disrupt cohesion in the last 3 weeks.

• The Grayson incident - this greatly affected our performance the last 25 min against Elon (didn't matter they weren't going to beat us) and the VT game. Not to mention the overall distraction.
• Coach K having surgery and missing (hopefully no more than 4 weeks) some time
• Amile suffering a significant injury that will cause him to miss "indefinite" time. Some time between 2-6 weeks seems a reasonable guesstimate - This obviously affected our play against FSU.

The team all has to learn how to play with each other to rely and trust each other in settings where things aren't smoothly going your way. Hitting all of your 3's in the first half against a mediocre-at-best GT team led to a brilliant display of basketball but figuring out how to fight back on the road against a good team is what we need to accomplish. We took a few punches from FSU and fought back but appeared to lose our composure a bit after the laughably bad travel call against Tatum quickly turned a potential 4 point lead into an 8 point deficit. Matt did hit a big 3 to cut it to 5 at 58-53 but after that it was all downhill.

On the injury front. I thought the 2015 Kentucky was a good comparison for this Duke team back in September before the injuries mounted. Combination of talented returning upperclassmen and stud freshmen. Now, if you recall that team had 10 players that Cal liked to platoon. Alex Poythress, about the 7th or 8th best man tore his ACL in the 8th game and played no more. The other top 9 players for 2015 UK missed a grand total of 6 games (Lyles 3, Booker 1, and Ulis 2) to injury that year. 2017 Duke is already at 32 missed games to injury among our top 9 players with Amile almost certainly going to add a few more to that number. To say that we have had a large amount of injuries is an understatement. I don't think we should have been expected to fully come around from the injuries by this point. It would have been nice to be a bit further along, but having Amile go out with another injury really makes it hard to judge our progress to our final goal.

[GLTBD]

Unlike Virginia Tech, Duke gets another crack at Florida State in Cameron on Feb 28. Let's go Duke

[subzero02]

Unlike Virginia Tech, Duke gets another crack at Florida State in Cameron on Feb 28. Let's go Duke

Yeah, senior night...

[Skydog]

While I agree with you in general, it's worth noting that on February 11, 2010, according to Pomeroy's rating at the time, Duke was #2 overall, with the #1 offense and the #15 defense. We had a 20-4 record. So I'm not sure we can fairly say the team didn't "start to come around" until February 13, though possibly we ratcheted it up another gear at that time.

And while you're absolutely right that the 2015 Duke team didn't really get the hang of defense until the NCAA tournament, overall I'm not sure we can fairly say that team didn't "start to come around" until February, since on February 1 we were 18-3 and ranked #4 in the country.

How do you find the Kenpom ratings info from a particular date? I have a Kenpom account and can find end-of-season rankings from prior years but don't know where to look for mid-season data.

[-jk]

How do you find the Kenpom ratings info from a particular date? I have a Kenpom account and can find end-of-season rankings from prior years but don't know where to look for mid-season data.

I don't subscribe. But if you don't grab data daily, you can always use the Way Back Machine. It has lots of data...

-jk

[Skydog]

I don't subscribe. But if you don't grab data daily, you can always use the Way Back Machine. It has lots of data...

-jk

Aha - never thought to use the WBM. Thanks!

[Kedsy]

I don't subscribe. But if you don't grab data daily, you can always use the Way Back Machine. It has lots of data...

-jk

Yeah, that's what I used.