Originally Posted by
Carlos
Besides, the team has been doing remarkably well with the pieces they have. For the most part, Duke has really forced other teams to adapt to the small ball style that the Devils are playing. Maryland, with Gist, Osby, Neal, and Walker combining for 79 out of 80 PF & C minutes, is an exception to the way things have been going. But if you look at the Clemson game, their big player rotation of Booker, Mays, Sykes, and Grant played 68 minutes out of 80 minutes. In their next game against WFU they combined for 84 out of 85 minutes (overtime game). In other close games such as the loss to Charlotte they played 88 out of 90 minutes (2 overtimes). Against UNC it was 80 out of 80 minutes.
It's not just Clemson either. Other teams such as FSU and VaTech have gone to smaller lineups against Duke as well. (Those stats can be somewhat misleading because the Hokies were without Jeff Allen, one of their primary frontcourt players, and the Seminoles Ryan Reid was playing his first game back after a 9-game suspension.)
I think one of the reasons Duke is so successful in forcing other teams to adapt to their style is that the Devils have a team that can really place a lot of pressure on a defense because guys like Nelson and Henderson can really attack the rim. So when Duke is going ultra small with Singler, Nelson, Henderson, Scheyer, and Smith/Paulus teams are faced with trying to defend either Nelson or Henderson with a player who is not comfortable defending away from the basket.
It's much easier to defend a guy who is smaller if all he's going to do is shoot jump shots. It's the guy who can do both who makes life really tough for the bigger defender. That's why, after watching Trevor Booker's futile efforts to check Gerald Henderson, Clemson switched him over to guarding Scheyer. And then after watching the team struggle with that alignment the Tigers gave up and played only one big man.
The other component of this is that Henderson and Nelson are both such physical players that they can defend larger guys. The big fear about going small is that while you gain an advantage on offense you give up one on defense. The odds are against the approach because generally speaking, it's easier to score from close to the basket with a big guy than to score from far away with the small guy. But Duke isn't relying on jumpers on offense and they're not struggling to defend the interior as much as one would expect so the results have been even better than one would anticipate.