MBB: Duke 87, Pitt 52 Post-Game Thread

[dukelifer]

I'll be surprised if Pitt wins any ACC games. For most of the game, they didn't look any better than our DII pre-season opponents.

I said this in the Duke Defense thread, but we gave up a ton of three-attempts. If Pitt had hit threes at their usual percentage and we had turned them over at our usual percentage (we had a pretty good TO rate of 23.6% tonight, much better than our season average), our dRtg for the game would not have been very good. As it was, neither of those things happened, so our dRtg was pretty good, and we're back in Pomeroy's top 100 (92nd), defensively. So thank goodness for small favors, but I don't think our defensive problems are solved yet.

Justin and Jack played really well, but expecting either of them to play in competitive games is asking for disappointment. K almost always plays the bench in games he expects to win by 25+, and this game looked like garbage time by the first timeout of the first half.

On the good side, a pretty dominant offensive performance. 21 assists to 6 turnovers, a game eFG% of 62.5%, and an amazing offensive rebounding performance (51.7% OR%). And all that with our bench playing 70 minutes. Just think how good it might have been if we could have hit a free throw.

Overall, it's great to win an ACC road game by 35 points. Miami only won by 14 at Pitt, so who knows.

With two bigs out (and maybe a gimpy Carter)- I bet JRob plays some more in the next week. He is a better option than Vrank.

[ipatent]

My favorite moment was when Carter re-entered the game !

Let's hope it doesn't turn into another nagging injury.

[devildeac]

Couldn't respond to fdd, OPK and Heyman in the pre-game/in-game thread so here goes:

To fdd: I don't like fries on sammiches either but thought I'd post something Pittsburghian in that thread. But OPK is correct that those sammiches are good for business .
To OPK: See above. Thanks.
To Heyman: Luckily, there are a buncha Primanti Brothers joints scattered around the northeast/midwest/Florida. Unluckily, I've never eaten at one .

[kAzE]

Good win. Loved seeing J-Rob and Jack White making some good plays, but I can't get too excited about it, since I don't think we really learned much from this game. However, it's gotta feel nice to finally get a win on the road.

I was kind of disappointed by the so called "zoo" student section at Pitt. Very generic chants and insults . . . you guys sure we're the ones who are overrated?

[Saratoga2]

With two bigs out (and maybe a gimpy Carter)- I bet JRob plays some more in the next week. He is a better option than Vrank.

I agree with that. Vrank, while huge and experienced is just slow and doesn't get off the floor.

We did have very good games from bench players with Robinson, White and O'Connell doing very well. Robinson doesn't appear to be the greatest athlete, but he is good sized at 6'9" and is a smooth shooter. He has some experience so can help on the defensive side. White is very active and is a strong young player and can hold his own with the guys that Pitt could put on the floor. O'Connell is quite a skilled played and an excellent athlete. He plays better defense than he is given credit for and is a very capable shooter. He defers on the shot but when he does try to score he is effective. I didn't mention Goldwire as he cramped up before I had much chance to appraise his play.

It's nice to have three effective subs get a chance to play on the road for significant minutes against an ACC opponent, however weak. Isn't it what quite a few posters been hoping for?

[Newton_14]

We beat an overmatched opponent; however, there were several positives:

1. Bench production
2. Intensity
3. > 40 percent on 3PT FGs

Grayson Allen going 2-9 from deep really skewed the team's 3PT FG performance. Take away his shots (made and missed), and Duke was 10-20 (50%). Grayson's touch will return all he has to do is keep shooting.

I thought Bagley and Carter fed off each other a bit tonight. When those two are complementing each other inside our frontcourt is a load.

I wanted to piggyback off the positive post by Mr Bob here. There were far more positives in this game than a couple of negatives. I'll address the two minor negatives I noticed. 1. Allowing Pitt to cut the lead from 32 to 17 over the first 8 minutes of the 2nd half. Our offense actually played a large role there. We were not good during that stretch at moving the ball and getting good, assisted shots, and the refs all of a sudden swallowed their whistles when Bagley and Carter were getting hammered on shot attempts near the rim. That mistake by the zebras is why things turned very chippy with the bigs. Not getting those calls hurt, and we lost our intensity on defense during that stretch. The other minor negative was Grayson not knocking down 3's at his normal rate. However he played much better overall than he did Saturday on both sides of the ball. He will return to form with his shot. I have no worries on that at all. I was at the State game Saturday and our seats were in the corner down from the Duke bench and right at the tunnel entrance to their locker room. I commented to my daughter that Grayson looked pale and had no energy. I am convinced he had or was recovering from one of the two nasty virus/bugs going around here. One being a bad stomach virus (my wife had that one over the weekend and a coworker had it Mon/Tues). Lots of other people we know have had either that one or the bad flu-like/sinus bug going around. I believe this Saturday will be a return to form from 3 and overall for Grayson.

On to the positives. Opponent aside (NC State is a bad team too, and while not as bad as Pitt, still bad), this was a very solid performance. The defense was much better, especially in the first half with the man to man. They were getting into the passing lanes, generating turnovers, blocking shots, etc and getting stops in general. I thought that helped fuel the fastbreak, and we executed well in turning those into points. Offensively it was the most balanced game we have had in awhile. In the State game and a couple others, we became very one dimensional I thought, running far too many plays for Bagley. The dude is freaking great but we have other really good scorers inside and out and to be who we want to be, we have to utilize that talent and hit the opponents with all our weapons. Tonight we did that.

K going deep into the bench right out of the gate and staying with it the entire game! JRob! What a game! Comes in early, looks very comfortable out there, taking those 3's in rhythm and knocking them down! He was also very active crashing the boards, blocking shots. Great game by the young man. Trevon knocking down 3's was another positive and he played with more control tonight.

There are many other positives but the last one I will mention is roaring back after Pitt had cut it to 17. It would have been a terrible mental blow to the guys had they limped to the finish line and only won by say 12 to 15 points. Instead, they gain back every single point of the original 32 point lead and actuallly added to it, winning by 35.

My advice, don't pooh pooh the win away because of Pitt. We needed to blow them out big and we did that and did it using guys that had barely played all year. When we get Bolden and Javin back and fully healthy, we will be a stronger team than the one we were tonight.

[PackMan97]

To be honest, this is what I was expecting to happen to NC State...maybe next year when State plays at Duke.

[BandAlum83]

Where did this Troovan guy come from? He was pretty good. I heard his name called a bunch of times by one of the announcers. He was noticing his play.

[duke96]

Hey ... how about Duval shooting 3-5 from 3! Hope this helps him get out of that rut.

[BandAlum83]

Hey ... how about Duval shooting 3-5 from 3! Hope this helps him get out of that rut.

I think Trevon only hit one of those. Troovan hit the other two.

[mkirsh]

Where did this Troovan guy come from? He was pretty good. I heard his name called a bunch of times by one of the announcers. He was noticing his play.

I assume Ravich wrote in his notes a phonetic spelling to make sure he said it right, like "Truvan Duvale" or something like that, but it was badly botched. Troovan can shoot the three though

Also, Pitt prevented us from the the black uniform hex by wearing their own black unis. The game was over as soon as they took off their warm ups. Does it count as a road win if we are wearing our home unis?

On a more serious note, while it was great to see the D play better (and I don't want to be Debbie Downer) but Pitt didn't seem to put us into a ton of the ball screen situations we have struggled to guard. They ran a lot more spacing and back cuts and a bunch of ill advised one on one. We did a good job defending straight up dribble penetration which was a positive.

Bagley was only 7 of 16, so a poor shooting night for him, but he seems to rebound at least half of his misses for easy putbacks. He needs his own effective fg% calc

[flyingdutchdevil]

1) Opponent was weak. Doesn't mean there aren't takeaways. Loved the defensive intensity and awareness. Loved Coach K's usage of the bench really early (although I doubt we see that again this season). Loved sharing the ball (21 assists on 34 made field goals).

2) Grayson is in this weird space between scoring and distributing. And I love it. He is playing without the fire that we've seen over the last three years, but I think that is a good thing. I really believe that when Grayson goes into full scoring mode, he plays with too much passion and emotion. The only aspect that I don't like is Grayson passes a little too much. There were two instances. The first is when Grayson drove to the hoop, got by his man, and basically had an empty net ahead of him. He then skip-passed to Duval who sunk the 3. Second, on a fast break, Marvin passed to Grayson who was wide open for the 3. Instead of shooting, Grayson passed back to Marvin who traveled. Shoot Grayson, shoot!

3) Trevon Duval increased his 3pt shooting by 4 percentage points! Duval was 60% from 3, tied with Justin Robinson. He shot better than Grayson AND Gary. Yup! For the record, I don't believe Duval is a good 3pt shooter. But I do not think that he's a 17% shooter (now 21%). I think he's probably in the low 30s. I'll take that.

4) Trent is sneaky on offense, and I want to see more of it. He's good at getting in the mid-range and capable of hitting from there. I want Gary to shoot more. Will allow our bigs to be in great position for offensive rebounds.

5) We're back in the top 100 defensively for KenPom! Small wins. Let's keep em coming

[Saratoga2]

I wanted to piggyback off the positive post by Mr Bob here. There were far more positives in this game than a couple of negatives. I'll address the two minor negatives I noticed.

1. Allowing Pitt to cut the lead from 32 to 17 over the first 8 minutes of the 2nd half. Our offense actually played a large role there. We were not good during that stretch at moving the ball and getting good, assisted shots, and the refs all of a sudden swallowed their whistles when Bagley and Carter were getting hammered on shot attempts near the rim. That mistake by the zebras is why things turned very chippy with the bigs. Not getting those calls hurt, and we lost our intensity on defense during that stretch.

The other minor negative was Grayson not knocking down 3's at his normal rate. However he played much better overall than he did Saturday on both sides of the ball. He will return to form with his shot. I have no worries on that at all. I was at the State game Saturday and our seats were in the corner down from the Duke bench and right at the tunnel entrance to their locker room. I commented to my daughter that Grayson looked pale and had no energy. I am convinced he had or was recovering from one of the two nasty virus/bugs going around here. One being a bad stomach virus (my wife had that one over the weekend and a coworker had it Mon/Tues). Lots of other people we know have had either that one or the bad flu-like/sinus bug going around. I believe this Saturday will be a return to form from 3 and overall for Grayson.

To comment on your negatives:

We had the bad stretch with the starters in the game. Did Pitt get instructions to get more physical during the half or some other reason?

As far as Grayson, I thought almost every aspect of his game was better last night, with the exception of his 3 point shooting. I have also noticing he has been missing more at the foul line as well. Hope he can get that sweet shooting touch back.

[moonpie23]

3 positives from last night.

1 - intensity
2 - the bench (k for using them more)
3 - warriors lose at home to the clips.

[Spanarkel]

I know that Grayson has a wonderful stroke, but this picture(no. 2 in the sequence from last night if the link doesn't direct to the actual photo) from GoDuke.com shows his eyes to be following the flight of the ball rather than being fixed on the rim. Any comments? Let's go, Duke!

http://www.goduke.com/PhotoAlbum.dbm...PALBID=2196687

[CDu]

To echo the comments about how bad Pitt is, Pitt has not won a game against a power-5 school this year, and has also lost to Navy and Montana. This was a game that we absolutely should have won easily, even though it was a road game. Still, actually doing so is some progress. I will get to more specific thoughts later. Plenty of positives, a few not-so-positives.

[Native]

I assume Ravich wrote in his notes a phonetic spelling to make sure he said it right, like "Truvan Duvale" or something like that, but it was badly botched.

Bilas actually mentioned during the State broadcast that Duval himself pointed out that broadcasters had been mispronouncing his name. According to Duval, the way that TV commentators pronounced his name last night is the correct pronunciation.

Troovan can shoot the three though

New year, new name, new shot. I can dig it.

[OldPhiKap]

I spell my name “OldPhiKap,” but it is pronounced “high-zen-berg.”

Say my name.

[Matches]

Man it would be great if we could fuse Robinson and White into one guy. Whibinson would have White’s athleticism and hops, plus Robinson’s length and stroke.

I was happy to see us take care of business against an overmatched opponent. Not sure how or if the bench play will translate against a legit opponent - I suspect not well - but it was nice to see those guys get some positive minutes. Hopefully a confidence-builder for them.

[Neals384]

Bagley was only 7 of 16, so a poor shooting night for him, but he seems to rebound at least half of his misses for easy putbacks. He needs his own effective fg% calc

ESPN jinxed him by putting up a graphic that he shot over 50% every game.