MBB: Duke 78, FSU 79 (OT)

[SilkyJ]

What was K's explanation for either not calling a TO at the end of not getting the ball to Paolo?

I don’t know if K spoke to this in the presser but He has made his stance on this topic quite clear: he prefers to not go against a set defense. Calling timeout allows the defense to get set.

For what it’s worth I disagree. He does this all the time and from my memory it has a poor success rate, but I don’t have the data to support that.

One of the key issues is as you state: our best player doesn’t often end up with the ball, it usually ends up with a guard who has to rush a shot. And even if he does get it he may not receive it in a good position with good spacing since everyone is rushing around. It’s just a poor decision in my mind, especially for someone so adept at drawing up plays. It reminds me of the Zion/RJ years when Zion would frequently not get the ball at the end of regulation despite being the clear and away best player on the team

[SilkyJ]

I can only pray Jon brings in an offensive game plan that isn't dribble and beat your man. K's roll the ball out OAD offense often leads to confusion and bad shots. Our talent to have players that can beat their man has resulted in our lofty offensive rankings in this Era. I could only imagine what it would be with sets and plays.

This is a silly post and deserves flames. It’s grounded in no data and is simply noise.

Going back to 2010, Duke has been been top 10 is offensive efficiency every year except last year when we were still #18. The issue, in some years but not all, has often been our defensive efficiency, which often lagged as young players struggled to adjust to K’s system.

I do think we can do a few things better on offense like feed AJ and Paolo more and in better spots; but it’s hard to complain about an offensive scheme that is perennially top 5-10.

[KandG]

Yeah hard disagree on Baker/John. Baker's obviously a very limited player (4 fouls in 19 minutes as a wing is not ideal), and probably not the game to play him extended minutes when we're getting manhandled on the glass. John just isn't it...significant net negative on offense (and kills spacing for Paolo), and not the gamechanger on D to make up for it (not to mention a very poor rebounder for a true 5). Would definitely avoid checking Henry Coleman's stats in SEC play...

I didn’t like Baker getting as many minutes as he did, but I thought he made more things happen than Griffin did for the first 30 minutes of the game, one or two lapses aside. I’ve said several times that I’m expecting Griffin to take an increasing number of minutes from Baker as the season progresses. But the reality right now is AJ tends to disappear from games if his shot isn’t falling and he’s a defensive liability.

Joey frequently tries to do too much but he successfully attacked a closeout for a layup, attacked another closeout and got a lob to Williams, and took a charge. Even when he turned it over on a ball inbounded to him, he immediately stole the ball back. I’d like to see AJ do more of these little things as the season progresses as he’s definitely a more skilled player.

(AJ’s late game minutes were better especially once he got a shot to fall, though his lackluster contest of Mills’ second three in OT was fatal)

As far as Johns, I wasn’t making a case for him as some massive impact player. But at the start of the second half, Florida State outscored us 11-3 and took 12 of 15 available rebounds, including nine offensive rebounds. Theo’s minutes at least provided a reset on the extreme physicality advantage FSU had on us.

He did miss two layups he should have made, but he also had a block, two good contests on FSU drives that resulted in defensive rebounds by us, and the rebounds overall were more even (7-6 FSU). If I’m not mistaken FSU didn’t build on their margin in Theo’s few minutes on the floor, not an insignificant thing given how we were hemorrhaging rebounds and points to start the second half.

Williams isn’t going to play 40 minutes in regulation or even 35 minutes, and we’re a bad rebounding team with Paolo as a smallball 5, so while I see Johns as limited, any positives he can contribute in his small stints against more physical teams are worth noting as far as I’m concerned.

[Kedsy]

Man, I just hope we don't play a Florida team in the NCAA tournament.


OFFENSE

Possessions: 71.2 (63.3 per 40; glacial, Duke's 2nd-slowest game of the season)
oRtg: 1.10 (1.19 adjusted; very good, the equivalent of the #7 offense in the nation)
eFG%: 58.2% (string; our 7th-best eFG of the season)
3pt%: 43.5% (awesome; our 6th-best 3pt% of the season)
2pt%: 53.1% (good, not spectacular)
%threes: 41.8% (pretty high, but the way we were hitting them, might as well let 'em fly)
FT rate: 32.7% (good; our 8th-best FTR of the season)
OR%: 23.3% (lousy; our 5th-worst OR performance of the season)
TO%: 21.1% (terrible; our 2nd-worst TO performance of the season)
a/to: 1.33:1
%assisted: 74.1% (our highest assist% of the season)
fast break pts: 8 (10.3% of points; poor, our worst fast break performance of the season)

DEFENSE

dRtg: 1.11 (1.06 adjusted; horrifying; our 2nd-worst adjusted D of the season and the equivalent of the #233 defense in the nation)
eFG%: 40.4% (really good)
3pt%: 28.0% (also good; sixth straight game our opponents have hit 30% or worse from three)
2pt%: 39.6% (excellent; our 4th-best opposing 2pt% of the season)
%threes: 34.2% (decent)
FT rate: 34.2% (not so good, our 3rd-worst opposing FTR of the season; see my next post for details)
DR%: 61.2% (pathetic, though not nearly as pathetic as our previous game; )
TO%: 7.0% (stupefying; our worst opposing TO% of the season; more detail in my next post)
a/to: 2.6:1 (highest opposing a/to of the season)
%assisted: 50.0%
stl%: 2.8% (blech; tied for worst steals game of the season)
blk%: 6.8% (10.4% of 2pt shots) (not good, our 6ht-worst block party of the season, though it's possible we blocked a couple more shots and just didn't get credit for them)
fast break pts: 9 (11.4% of points; meh, especially in a game this slow)


So, good offense (despite too many turnovers and too few offensive rebounds), terrible defense. We held them to a really good shooting pct, but were awful at the other three defensive factors.

[mkirsh]

Williams shot blocking is such a defensive weapon, but for two games now Duke has been unable to rebound defensively when Mark contests shots. I think that’s why the rebounding actually improved in the zone - FSU was driving less, therefore Williams was contesting less, and the team rebounded better. I really hope they figure this out as defensive rebounding has become the biggest team weakness.

[Kedsy]

A couple oddities. First, it's intuitive that the home team gets more calls, but for this year's Duke team the disparity in our opposing free throw rate between home/neutral games and true road games has been amazing. I mentioned this in the pre-game thread, but an opposing FTR of 25% is really good, and so far we've been at or below (mostly a lot below) 25% in every single home and neutral game. We've played three true road games and tonight was our best opposing free throw rate of the three games at 34.2%.

Opponent	opp FTR	H/R
Citadel		7.8%	H
Kentucky	9.1%	N
Lafayette	9.8%	H
NC State	13.3%	H
Army		13.6%	H
SC State	14.3%	H
Campbell	14.5%	H
Va Tech		14.8%	H
Miami		15.7%	H
Gonzaga		17.2%	N
Elon 		18.4%	H
Ga Tech		18.8%	H
Gardner-Webb	21.1%	H
App State	25.0%	H
FSU		34.2%	R
Wake Forest	37.0%	R
Ohio State	40.7%	R

This one is weirder, and might just be coincidence, but so far this season we've played nine games with a pace under 71 and those games include our seven worst opposing TO% games. We've played eight games with a pace over 71 and those games include six of our seven best opposing TO% games.

Opponent	opp TO%	pace
Campbell	15.2%	59.23
FSU		7.0%	63.30
VaTech		15.6%	63.94
App St		19.7%	66.09
GaTech		13.4%	67.35
Wake Forest	21.9%	68.35
NCSU		16.0%	68.58
Ohio St		17.1%	70.03
Miami		7.1%	70.65
Elon		32.4%	71.08
Citadel		18.0%	72.06
Lafayette	23.6%	72.09
Gardner-Webb	23.4%	72.68
Kentucky	17.8%	73.13
Army		26.9%	77.97
SC St		21.5%	78.90
Gonzaga		21.5%	79.03

It's not a straight line correlation (for example, our 2nd-worst TO game had just less than 71 possessions and our best TO game had just more than 71), but we clearly turn over our opponents a much lower rate in slow games than in fast games (and this is pace-adjusted). I don't know why this is. Our offensive turnovers don't show anything close to a similar trend (for example, our three worst TO games, the only games we've had a turnover rate over 20%, have come in our 2nd-slowest game (tonight), our 2nd-fastest game, and a game right in the middle).

[PackMan97]

Let down game after a big emotional win over an in-state rival. It happens.

[uh_no]

switching to zone was a master stroke, regardless of outcome. I liked that we went over the top to williams a few times.

I'll stop there.

[Kedsy]

I can only pray Jon brings in an offensive game plan that isn't dribble and beat your man. K's roll the ball out OAD offense often leads to confusion and bad shots. Our talent to have players that can beat their man has resulted in our lofty offensive rankings in this Era. I could only imagine what it would be with sets and plays.

Your statement is not borne out by the data. Duke this season is 55th in the country in assist% (percentage of baskets that are assisted), 12th among Power Six teams. That's inconsistent with your assertion that we go one-on-one all the time.

It should be clear by now that Moore is not a play maker and should contribute from off the ball. He is a good defender and can score but is a liability when put into the role of a play maker.

A liability? This is simply not true. Yes, Wendell turned it over too much in our two recent losses, but for the season he has been by far our best playmaker. He has the most assists per game (as well as best assist%) on Duke's team by a large margin, and even with the two bad games has an assist to turnover ratio above 2:1.

As far as Johns, I wasn’t making a case for him as some massive impact player. But at the start of the second half, Florida State outscored us 11-3 and took 12 of 15 available rebounds, including nine offensive rebounds. Theo’s minutes at least provided a reset on the extreme physicality advantage FSU had on us.

If you're trying to fix our defensive rebounding issues, you probably need to look elsewhere than Theo John. He has strengths, but for a center he's a terrible defensive rebounder. His current pace would rate him the 3rd-worst defensive rebounding center since Coach K came to Duke. This season, his defensive rebounding percentage is worse than Wendell Moore's, Jaylen Blakes's and Bates Jones's (and is WAY worse than either Mark Williams or Paolo Banchero). He was also a bad defensive rebounder at Marquette.

[Dukehk]

We just always seem to do badly in Florida.

Not exclusive to this team.

leonard hamilton is just a tough bastard to play against when its us.

On a side note, can't believe leonard is only 1 year younger than K!

Time flies.

[hsheffield]

we missed an amazing number of chip shots.

we've got the bodies, don't understand why can't we get OReb-anyone got any ideas?




glad to see Trevor putting weight on that right leg: I was worried about an ACL tear...

[arnie]

Let down game after a big emotional win over an in-state rival. It happens.

Yea, the win at Wake Forest last week was huge😀

[roywhite]

Oh no, that dreaded term from Coach K in his postgame comments

“It was a tremendous basketball game. Great crowd, two teams that played their hearts out. I thought it was the most physical game
we’ve been in. They knocked us back for most of the first half, and at the end of the first half we took some control. And then right
away at the start of the second half, they dominated those first four minutes and set a tone where we could’ve been knocked out.

https://goduke.com/documents/2022/1/...h_K_Quotes.pdf

[Mtn.Devil.91.92.01.10.15]

Oh no, that dreaded term from Coach K in his postgame comments

“It was a tremendous basketball game. Great crowd, two teams that played their hearts out. I thought it was the most physical game
we’ve been in. They knocked us back for most of the first half, and at the end of the first half we took some control. And then right
away at the start of the second half, they dominated those first four minutes and set a tone where we could’ve been knocked out.

https://goduke.com/documents/2022/1/...h_K_Quotes.pdf

It's over

[mkirsh]

We just always seem to do badly in Florida.

Not exclusive to this team.

leonard hamilton is just a tough bastard to play against when its us.

On a side note, can't believe leonard is only 1 year younger than K!

Time flies.

Regardless of personnel, rankings, etc, we always seem to have a hard time at FSU, at State, at VT and vs Miami. Fortunately we don’t have any more of these this year.

[jv001]

Oh no, that dreaded term from Coach K in his postgame comments

“It was a tremendous basketball game. Great crowd, two teams that played their hearts out. I thought it was the most physical game
we’ve been in. They knocked us back for most of the first half, and at the end of the first half we took some control. And then right
away at the start of the second half, they dominated those first four minutes and set a tone where we could’ve been knocked out.

https://goduke.com/documents/2022/1/...h_K_Quotes.pdf

When I read K's post game presser and read that I thought not the "we got knocked back" quote again.

GoDuke!

[Dr. Maturin]

KenPom has a metric called "Luck" which is a rating that looks at how many games a team wins relative to its performance. A team with a high Luck rating will have won more games than their performance would have suggested, and vice versa.

Last year, Duke was 347 in Luck. This year, the number is 291. The likely culprit is an unusual number of close losses. Since the start of last season, Duke is 4-12 in games decided by 7 points or fewer. During that stretch, 12 of our 15 ACC wins have come by double digits, and 10 of our 11 losses have been by single digits.

My point isn't that Duke's luck will surely turn around. Maybe it will, but those things can take longer than a year or two to even out. My point is that Duke has probably been a better team that it's pure W-L record would suggest. Hopefully with some experience in close games, this team will get better at closing out the close ones.

[SMAX]

Rebounding is effort. We don’t get enough offensive rebounds because we have a 6’10” power forward who wants to hang on the perimeter.He likes to watch the flight of the ball (regardless of who shoots it)rather than crash the boards. keels and Baker routinely crash the boards Defensive rebounding was atrocious but somehow better when they played zone. Supposedly harder to rebound out of a zone
I think the preseason cupcake schedule that Duke has adopted over the years has these guys convinced their opponents will fatigue in the second half. That doesn’t work against any ACC team. I don’t enjoy all the preseason cupcake games at home and real games played at Madison Square Garden. As a fan who has attended these games in person it really stinks. This schedule does not prepare the team for ACC caliber athletic opponents.

[Spanarkel]

Twice in the past 3 games, Paolo has had his right-handed layups blocked at the rim on drives from the left side.
(last night at the 3:15 mark in OT).

Shouldn't he have a left-handed move from the left side in his tool box by now?

[DCDevil9194]

I'm going to get flamed for this but I think Scheyer is a better in game coach than K.

Based on Scheyer’s two games as head coach?