SI's Stewart Mandel - fair comment

[SMO]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...x.html?eref=T1

The greatest omission of this piece is Duke's dominance of the ACC tournament. To accept that Duke's place among the top programs is overstated, one would have to accept that the ACC is not a top conference. Duke's dominance of the ACC tourney in recent years demonstrates that late in the season, Duke is the top team in one of the top conferences in the country.

But let's forget that inconvenient truth and focus on February losing streaks. The facts Mandel presents are selective confirmation.

[heyman25]

Agree with Jason Evans the writer states the facts without obvious duke hating style that most sportswriters use. What has happened to Shavlik Randolph. I guess he has his contract but he can't be on the 76'ers active roster. JJ can't do anything but sit til next year unless Evans Bogans or Dooling suffers an injury.Williams is now a center behind Brad Miller.He will get time but not major pt.Dahntay Jones was waived by the Kings and has not been picked up. McRoberts will sit on the Portland bench.
Hill Deng Boozer Dunleavey and eventually Brand and Maggette Battier Duhon are all successful NBA players. Ewing and Langdon are in Russia.Sean Dockery I think is still playing pro overseas as well as Nick Horvath down under. Crawford Palmer must have retired. I wonder what Cherokee and Erik Meek do professionally. I would think Cherokee might be in something like skateboards and accessories.Being a Huntington Beach native 7 footer with lots of tatoos. Jason Williams and Lee Melchionni are in sports agencies. Danny Ferry made the last trade of the trading season today.I hope it keeps LeBron James happy or Danny might join Billy King as an ex General Manager.Anyone know what Billy King is doing now?

[RelativeWays]

There's no denying some of the points he makes about Duke hitting the wall in MArch, but Duke is hardly alone in that catagory. There are quite a few College basketball "elite teams that either have one or no Final four appearances this decade, many have recruits that didn't pan out in college or the pros, but its Duke and apparently its only Duke's problem.

If you want my opinion on why Duke falters in February or March since 2004 is because Coach K hasn't had that leadership player that kind of embodies his priniciples on the court. Who is the last good leader Duke has had? And I mean a K type guy that takes charge on the court (in Battier's case, takes lots of charges ) It wasn't Redick or Williams. It surely wasn't anyone on last years team, and I'm not seeing it this year. You could make the case for Duhon as the senior in 03-04, before you had Williams, Battier, Wojo, Grant, Laettner, etc, etc...We need to establish a true leader, I'm not sure D-marc is it. I had high hopes for Paulus after what he endured last year, but he hasn't turned the corner yet. If we don't have someone to emotionally galvanize the team, we doomed in March.

[Mudge]

Has some very interesting points. I don't like the Duke hating but ESPN is to blame for that. I will say though nobody gets hammered more often then Duke for recruiting " busts... The notion that players become McDonald's All Americans after Duke signs them is a flat out joke. Rankings are updated two to three times a year and only once after players have signed. So would have Patrick Patterson jumped into the top 5 if he had signed at Duke?

Has the recruiting suffered or is this just a string of bad luck?

1) This article is from SI, not ESPN, which as far as I know, has not been accused of any anti-Duke bias.

2) It has been suggested with a number of recruits that they moved up in the rankings (even on to the McDonald's list) as a result of Duke recruiting them. Wojo is the most widely known of these, although I suspect that Boateng and/or Thompson also fit this mold. Yes, I believe that some have moved up higher after they became Duke recruits. I'm not sure that Paulus doesn't fit this description (in basketball, not football-- I've no idea if Paulus is as good at football as Dick Vitale claims he is.)

3) I suggested in a thread on the old bulletin board last year that Duke's recruiting was no longer at the level that it had been in the Golden Era (from 1997-2003). This is not news that Duke has not recruited at its former level lately; however, I would argue that this year's class with Singler and Smith is step in the right direction, as these two players would have fit in with any of those classes from 1997-2003. Henderson and Scheyer from the previous year are also near that level as well, so perhaps Duke is beginning to regain its recruiting Mojo, after several years of missing badly. Certainly this year's results to date suggest that the coaching staff is getting back on track.

[Mudge]

The most obvious possibility that Mandel did not consider regarding scheduling is that many schools probably don't want to play Duke at home for fear of being blown out early in the season. The other interesting thing to either validate or refute his arguments would be to see how other top programs fare late in the season. Do other teams hit losing streaks or play less consistently? It's funny, all this attention is paid to Duke because they lost 2 games. Not even UCLA or UNC would get this type of attention for the same thing. That speaks louder than any of Mandel's points.

Actually, what Mandel does not mention is that Duke had two pretty good home-and-home non-conference rivalries against traditionally powerful teams that got canceled for different reasons. We used to play Michigan (when they were good) every year, but when Amaker became their coach, K did not want to play against his former player (for reasons of loyalty, not competition.) Now, it wouldn't help our SOS to play them, as they're so bad, they're about as useful as playing Temple and St. Johns. We used to play UCLA every year, until their coach (not sure if that was Harrick or Lavin at the time) got tired of us beating their head in every year (and using the free publicity to steal top West Coast recruits.)

Also, I think we used to play Notre Dame pretty regularly, but again, I think Digger Phelps got tired of losing to us (and still hasn't gotten over it, apparently), and it won't be re-started with K disciple Mike Brey coaching there now. We also tried to play a home-and-home with Arizona many years ago, but we got homered so badly by the refs out there, the rumor is that K swore off playing them anymore... it's not as though Lute Olsen is the most gracious person to collaborate with, either-- he's like a 75-year old version of Roy Williams.

Also, we still play Temple and St. Johns home-and-home, but both of these once great programs have declined and show no signs of emerging... I think K is loyal to them because they give us exposure in two major media cities, and he hopes that one day soon they will revive-- K knows what it is like to be great, suffer decay, and then have to try to rebuild. I also think K is willing to play Illinois on a home-and-home basis, as long as the home game is played in Chicago (which, let's be honest, would be a home court advantage for Illinois), because again, he wants to get major media city exposure-- so he can continue to get more than his fair share of those McDonald's AA's in the future.

[Mudge]

Wait? You mean when teams start playing the tougher part of their schedule, they're going to lose more? Genius!

What a piece of trash. It doesn't take any "research" to add up win-loss numbers.

By the way, where is the mention of the ACC tournament, which we've won like 10000 of the last 10002 times or something ridiculous like that? I'd say that's finishing pretty strong... Or how would the numbers look if you removed the outlier (last year)? This is just lazy writing, nothing more.

So many fans here are immediately dismissive of reasoned criticism of Duke-- not that that is any different than fans of any other program-- it's just that I hope for more from Duke fans than I do from, say, Kentucky fans. This story is anything but lazy, as the writer uses quite a lot of facts to back up his story. I would only argue that he has, in some areas, failed to dig deep enough to get the most accurate set of facts about Duke's current situation.

For example, his own magazine's picture accompanying this story has a caption which criticizes Henderson's recent scoring output, but he fails to note that Henderson is playing with a fairly serious injury-- even though the very same picture clearly shows the large brace on GH's shooting wrist/hand. Mandel also misses a number of Duke players who have played or are playing in the NBA right now (Randolph, Ewing- who was on an NBA roster last year, J. Williams-- who would be on a roster now, to name a few). Mandel also fails to dig into the reasons behind Duke's movement away from true home-and-home series with teams like UCLA, Michigan, and Notre Dame (which are not because Duke did not want to play these teams.) He also doesn't sufficiently discuss that Duke may WANT the slightly less talented players, exactly BECAUSE they are less likely to leave school early.

So, I would argue that he did a passable job of research, but he could have done much better, and thus presented a more nuanced picture.

[chrisM]

But let's forget that inconvenient truth and focus on February losing streaks. The facts Mandel presents are selective confirmation.

The past three years, Duke has underperformed in the NCAA tournament, relative to the average team with their seed. By a significant amount- they went out more than a round early each year. That is a real problem.

Chris

[DevilCastDownfromDurham]

I think the article is interesting and well-researched, and written in a very professional manner, but ultimately overblown. In fact, I'm not sure I quite understand his argument. Is it that Duke can't recruit good NBA talent? In a season where our alums have had massive injuries we're still one of the 4-5 best schools in the TDD fantasy league. And how much NBA talent were we churning out in the late 1980's when we went to 7 FF's in 9 seasons? Is it that we don't schedule enough OOC true road games? Mandel recognizes that our SOS is uniformly in the top of the nation, and I'm just not buying that 1-2 games in December played at Rupp/Storrs/etc. are really more important than a game at the Dean Dome, at Maryland, etc. In fact, like UNC, I'd argue that Duke's schedule is consistently underrated because we get everybody's best shot. In effect we play "better" teams than most lesser-known programs and face more energized and hostile crowds every time we step on the court.

Anyway, we're cherry-picking a 6 year period (2002-2007) that begins the year after 3 consecutive historically dominant seasons. In that time Duke has been head-and-shoulders above everyone in the regular season as Mandel recognizes.

In the NCAA's Duke is 12-6 with 1 FF and 0 NCAA misses. How many other teams have averaged 2 wins over the same period? How many of those have never missed the NCAAs? Not UConn, UNC, etc. I think you can argue that Florida has been better than us (never missed, 2 titles). Otherwise, there are 2 teams with 1 more FF than us: Kansas which has done it's share of underperforming, and UCLA, which missed the NCAAs 2 times (2003, 2004) in the same span, or 1/3 of the total tournaments. That's it, that's the list.

All of this is to say, Duke hasn't been better than everyone else, but it's hard to argue we've been appreciably worse either. Florida's historic run makes them, imo, the clear #1, but after that we're (at worst) neck and neck with Kansas, UNC, and UCLA, as we have been for just about the entire history of college basketball.

And if our swoon is a February/March phenomenon, we must really stink in the ACC tournament, right? After all, the ACC has sent a third of the NCAA champions in that period and the ACC is always one of the top 2-3 conferences, so poor stumbling Duke must just get crushed.

Actually, we get all those undeserved #1 NCAA seeds because we win a lot of games and have a high RPI/SOS (as Mandel recognized) AND because we won the ACC tournament on Selection Sunday in 4 of the 6 seasons (with an OT loss in the championship game in 1 other).

The bottom line is that the NCAA is really tough to win. In 100 years only two teams have more than 5, and both of those were fueled by massive cheating. Any team with Duke's consistent success (and #1 seeds) is going to "underperform" in the NCAA's if a FF is expected. Good players get you regular season success, matchups and luck win you titles. I'd argue that several of those seasons (2003 and 2005) in fact represent significant over-performance that just couldn't be sustained past the Sweet 16. In 2004 we lost to the eventual champions in the FF by 1 point. Basically, we've had 2 years of real underachievement and in each case the team that beat us went to the FF.

All of that said, I think you can make an argument that Duke has been "down" (again in a highly relative sense) for the last 3-4 season. I just don't buy that scheduling or recruiting NBA talent has been the major culprit. Here are the three problems that I think are major factors:

1) The Class of 2005 - For years K used a recruiting method that hinged on giant classes every 2-3 seasons, with 1-2 hand-picked parts inserted in the intervening seasons (Killer B's, JWill/Boozer/Dun, Selected 6, etc.) I've been griping about this for years and it came back to bite us hard in '05. That was a relatively weak class overall and of our 3 Burger Boys only 1 player has panned out (Greg). If Josh had played like the #1 player, if Greg had been the creator we expected, and if Boat, Marty, or Boykin had ever made ANY sort of impact there might be a 2006 banner in Cameron and there definitely wouldn't have been the (22-win) "disaster" that was 2007.

2) Injury - Everyone has injuries, but whether its bad luck, the floor in Cameron, or karma for the AMEx ads, we've been bit really hard by the injury bug. Two of our biggest recruits, Shav and Nelson, essentially lost their careers to injury and, like Ron Curry for UNC, that really sets a team back. We've also had several more players with a series of major injuries including Dave McClure, Josh McRoberts, Brian Zoubek, Gerald Henderson, and Marty Pocius. It's easy to argue that losing those guys is no great loss, but a) depth has been our Achilles heel and b) it can be argued that a lot of those guys would have been a lot better if they hadn't missed so much practice time, game time, and conditioning. In any event, losing 2-3 projected superstars and 3-4 more expected role-players is a lot in 6 seasons.

3) Transfers/No Shows - In this 6 year period we've had Sweet, MT, Leavingsoon, Hump, Boat, and Boykin all check out before playing any significant minutes. Stars never showed up and role-players bailed before they could develop. We've averaged one loss like this (above the normal graduation/early-entry losses) every season in this period. There's a reason why, and a cost for having 0 seniors last season and 1 this season.

What Duke does going forward is anyone's guess. We could run the table to a title or fall apart like last season, and neither would surprise me much. How we do, however, will probably reflect more about our recruiting, health, and matchups rather than whether or not we go to Rupp to play a game in December or whether or not Jon finds the right fit in the NBA.

[SMO]

The past three years, Duke has underperformed in the NCAA tournament, relative to the average team with their seed. By a significant amount- they went out more than a round early each year. That is a real problem.

Chris

Ah, the 3-year trend analysis. Let's take this useful analysis one step further. Duke just lost its last two games to teams significantly inferior, therefore, this is a major problem negating 22 wins and clearly indicative of a season in decline and perhaps an overall program on the verge of collapse. I love stats.

You know, it's supposed to snow where I live tonight. Global warming must not be real.

[Wander]

So many fans here are immediately dismissive of reasoned criticism of Duke-- not that that is any different than fans of any other program-- it's just that I hope for more from Duke fans than I do from, say, Kentucky fans. This story is anything but lazy, as the writer uses quite a lot of facts to back up his story.

I think Coach K did an awful coaching job last year, and did an awful coaching job against Miami. I have a lot of problems with stuff that he says, like the stupid remarks he made after Gerald's elbow. I think the line monitors suck, the kids in tent 1 have a ridiculously inflated sense of self-importance, our women's program is about to entire a serious period of decline, Alleva is a dbag, etc. I'm not dismissive of reasoned criticism of Duke.

However, this is not reasoned criticism. It is lazy criticism, and it's an overreaction to Duke's two losses this week. All the facts he cites can be pulled from an ESPN.com webpage. He doesn't provide any real insight, fails to look at other elite programs for comparison, and conveniently omits Duke's dominance of the ACC tournament. It's lazy and an overreaction.

[DukeDevilDeb]

Article that at first seems overly critical, but gains perpsective.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/200...x.html?eref=T1

Explain, please. I thought Mandel did the usual "here is why Duke stinks" job and was not nearly as competent at it as others.

[dukie8]

The most obvious possibility that Mandel did not consider regarding scheduling is that many schools probably don't want to play Duke at home for fear of being blown out early in the season. The other interesting thing to either validate or refute his arguments would be to see how other top programs fare late in the season. Do other teams hit losing streaks or play less consistently? It's funny, all this attention is paid to Duke because they lost 2 games. Not even UCLA or UNC would get this type of attention for the same thing. That speaks louder than any of Mandel's points.

which schools do you know of that won't schedule duke in their own arenas? it has been rumored on here for a long time that certain schools, like kentucky and uconn, won't do a home-and-home contract, but claiming that there are many schools won't schedule duke at their places is a new one. it is a guaranteed sell-out and a guaranteed national tv game.

all this attention is paid to duke not because of 2 losses but because of how badly they have played in the 2 losses. from 60-55 against wake to about 5 minutes left yesterday had to have been the most horrendous 45 or so consecutive minutes of duke basketball that i can remember. it was worse than anything last year and in 1995. when was the last time that duke gave up the most points and committed the most turnovers in a game this late in the season and then followed up that bomb with an even worse bomb by giving up even more points and committing even more turnovers in the very next game?

[DukeDevilDeb]

There's no denying some of the points he makes about Duke hitting the wall in MArch, but Duke is hardly alone in that catagory. There are quite a few College basketball "elite teams that either have one or no Final four appearances this decade, many have recruits that didn't pan out in college or the pros, but its Duke and apparently its only Duke's problem.

If you want my opinion on why Duke falters in February or March since 2004 is because Coach K hasn't had that leadership player that kind of embodies his priniciples on the court. Who is the last good leader Duke has had? And I mean a K type guy that takes charge on the court (in Battier's case, takes lots of charges ) It wasn't Redick or Williams. It surely wasn't anyone on last years team, and I'm not seeing it this year. You could make the case for Duhon as the senior in 03-04, before you had Williams, Battier, Wojo, Grant, Laettner, etc, etc...We need to establish a true leader, I'm not sure D-marc is it. I had high hopes for Paulus after what he endured last year, but he hasn't turned the corner yet. If we don't have someone to emotionally galvanize the team, we doomed in March.

I love the guys on this team and have taught many of them, but I think you are right about a lack of leadership. DeMarcus is a great leader by example (most of the time ) but not by word and deed. I agree about Redick and Williams... again, great guys but not leaders. I would even question Duhon... but it is hard to know what would have happened had his injury in the ACC tourney not occurred. In my estimation, Battier was the last K leader we had.

And I'm not dissing guys who have played recently. Davis and Laettner were superb leaders, as was Grant Hill. Bobby Hurley, one of the best college point guards ever, was NOT a great leader... and we had a quick NCAA exit his senior year.

I'm not sure how to identify that leadership a priori. I'm sure K thought Redick and MacR would have it. But that is the piece missing from this puzzle. I am praying that Greg will continue to make forward progress... his gutsy enthusiasm has the best potential of any of today's players. But just 'cause you're a Mickie D AA doesn't mean that you can lead from the heart!

Go Devils!

[dukie8]

I think Coach K did an awful coaching job last year, and did an awful coaching job against Miami. I have a lot of problems with stuff that he says, like the stupid remarks he made after Gerald's elbow. I think the line monitors suck, the kids in tent 1 have a ridiculously inflated sense of self-importance, our women's program is about to entire a serious period of decline, Alleva is a dbag, etc. I'm not dismissive of reasoned criticism of Duke.

However, this is not reasoned criticism. It is lazy criticism, and it's an overreaction to Duke's two losses this week. All the facts he cites can be pulled from an ESPN.com webpage. He doesn't provide any real insight, fails to look at other elite programs for comparison, and conveniently omits Duke's dominance of the ACC tournament. It's lazy and an overreaction.

how can you call mandel's piece "lazy?" you might not agree with it but he has a ton of facts to support his arguments and presents them in an unbiased manner. the guy has done his homework.

[Wander]

how can you call mandel's piece "lazy?"

I can call it lazy because it's lazy. Compiling a win loss record of a team in a certain month takes pretty little effort. It's pretty easy to pick and select statistics that prove your point in just about any type of argument. It's less easy, and takes much more effort, to select a good set of statistics that gives a more complete picture of what's going on. There's no one way to do this, but as some have suggested, one idea that would help would be to provide meaningful numbers for other elite programs like Kansas and UConn and compare.

[dukie8]

I can call it lazy because it's lazy. Compiling a win loss record of a team in a certain month takes pretty little effort. It's pretty easy to pick and select statistics that prove your point in just about any type of argument. It's less easy, and takes much more effort, to select a good set of statistics that gives a more complete picture of what's going on. There's no one way to do this, but as some have suggested, one idea that would help would be to provide meaningful numbers for other elite programs like Kansas and UConn and compare.

your criticism is lazy -- not the piece. where are all of your stats and tables supporting your argument? i must have missed that post. the article was about how duke recently has won a lot of games in nov-jan and then fallen apart in feb/march -- NOT about how this phenomenon occurs with all elite teams or just duke. i'm sure that kansas has demonstrated a similar propensity for late season swoons in recent years (their ncaat performances have been atrocious) but you completely missed the point of the article if you thought it should have been an exhaustive study of elite college programs and their successes at different points in the season.

[BD80]

Explain, please. I thought Mandel did the usual "here is why Duke stinks" job and was not nearly as competent at it as others.

I thought his comments on the McDonald's AAs was fair, we haven't been getting the same championship level talent as we did during our string of Final Four appearances. I also thought his conclusion was fair:

Taking all of the aforementioned data into account, it would seem the common theme among Duke's recent teams is that they spend most of the season playing above themselves. Krzyzewski certainly deserves credit for adapting each year to the personnel on hand and maximizing their talent, but eventually the gas runs out and/or they get exposed by more talented teams -- the very kind of teams they avoid playing early in the season.

My big problem is the metric used - Duke's own success prior to 2002. Who else in basketball has "succeeded" since 2001 under Mandel's analysis?

[mapei]

your criticism is lazy -- not the piece. where are all of your stats and tables supporting your argument? i must have missed that post. the article was about how duke recently has won a lot of games in nov-jan and then fallen apart in feb/march -- NOT about how this phenomenon occurs with all elite teams or just duke. i'm sure that kansas has demonstrated a similar propensity for late season swoons in recent years (their ncaat performances have been atrocious) but you completely missed the point of the article if you thought it should have been an exhaustive study of elite college programs and their successes at different points in the season.

I agree. I think the criticisms were fair and better supported than almost everything any of us posts here on the board. It's a trend that the writer has observed, and it will continue to be a trend until we go deeper in the NCAA tournament. I agree that the ACC tourney should count more but, for whatever reason, it doesn't. ACC tourney success has become a terrible predictor of NCAA success.

Like Jason said, the way to refute the argument is to win.

[dukie8]

I thought his comments on the McDonald's AAs was fair, we haven't been getting the same championship level talent as we did during our string of Final Four appearances. I also thought his conclusion was fair:

Taking all of the aforementioned data into account, it would seem the common theme among Duke's recent teams is that they spend most of the season playing above themselves. Krzyzewski certainly deserves credit for adapting each year to the personnel on hand and maximizing their talent, but eventually the gas runs out and/or they get exposed by more talented teams -- the very kind of teams they avoid playing early in the season.

My big problem is the metric used - Duke's own success prior to 2002. Who else in basketball has "succeeded" since 2001 under Mandel's analysis?

um. florida. the last 2 ncs with not a lot of prized recruits. uconn. a nc in 2004 with not a lot of prized recruits. okafur might have had a 4.0 in high school but he wasn't highly sought after. gonzaga. not a lot of prized recruits (any?) and plenty of ncaat upsets.

[dukie8]

Like Jason said, the way to refute the argument is to win.

i agree! hopefully mandel has to write an update to his article in april about how his analysis has been skewed by duke in 2008.