Duke 72, Kentucky 77 Post Game Thread

This place has really gotta accept criticism in order to have complete conversations. No one has “called for Sheyer’s head”, no one is acting like the season is over, etc. There are very fair criticisms of this game and of patterns that are fair cause for concern with as much legitimacy as assumptions we will improve, get better as a team, or not have a shooting night this bad again.

I think Scheyer is a good coach with a bright future who hasn’t hit his ceiling but if he wakes up this morning thinking “ah well sometimes you just go cold, ref’s sure did let them play in the 2nd half, hope we see them in March” and moves forward with no changes then it would be fair to reevaluate that position. One game does not make a pattern but this is not just one game where we go cold, make no adjustments, and lose to an older physical team trying to play hero ball with like 6 guys.
 
Forgot to mention Kentucky I think he underatted. They got size, good shooting, and good defense. I think they will be a top 5 team by end of year. The good thing is the last two years Duke has gotten better as the season as gone on.
 
simplyluvin said:
I feel very much the opposite after this one. I know we had a really bad shooting night, but this one should have been the easiest of our ranked opponents this month. We should get better, but we are not as good as I thought. I can easily see us starting the season with 4 wins and 4 losses.
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How would feel if Flagg took and made the shot with 20 seconds, and we held on to win by 2? A couple of missed plays does not change the trajectory of this team. They will learn for the poor execution and hopefully make more threes.
 
We lost because we shot poorly. OK. The reason the game was frustrating, though, is because we still had a great chance to win the game - in fact, we WERE winning it - despite our horrible shooting, and we couldn't close it out. With 10 minutes to go in the game, we were still up 8 and Kentucky's win chance was something like 10%. And then we got away from playing team ball and became static. Honestly, we looked really tired to me. While they were crisply passing the ball all over the floor causing us to chase, on our offensive end, we were standing around watching Cooper and Kon and giving most of their guys a nice break.

And I'm not sure why people are lumping Proctor and Foster and blaming them. We have four guards (yes, Kon's role on this team is as a guard), and none of them played particularly well. But I thought the one that played the best was Proctor. Kon was more active and had much higher usage, but he couldn't hit the broadside of a barn, and his defense was a liability. Maybe look to pass on occasion? Proctor and Foster had 7 assists on the night. But the problem is, that led the team. The entire team only had 12 assists on 28 buckets. That's not getting it done. We need to learn how to better play as a team in order to unlock talented opposition.

Speaking of learning, Scheyer has some learning to do, too. Playing as a team is his job. If we play as a team and fail at it, that's one thing. But when we don't even try to play as a team, that's on the coach. For the last 10 minutes of this game, we had zero assists. Not one. Our last assist in the entire game came when Proctor passed to Cooper for a three with 10:21 left on the clock. That is unacceptable. Sure, some of that was shooting. You can't assist on a shot someone doesn't hit. But just manually looking at the box score play-by-play, in those last ten minutes, there were ten official field goal attempts from either Cooper (6) or Kon (4), and only four shots from everyone else. Cooper's supposed great skill is making everyone around him better. But he's doesn't do that by being ball dominant. We stopped relying on what makes us good, which is that we have a whole team full of excellent players that our best players help to elevate. We need ALL of our guys involved, all the time. They weren't. That's on Jon.

The sky is not falling, but we can play much better basketball than we did last night. I hope we learn those lessons and improve moving forward.

Go Duke!
 
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Extremely frustrating loss for me to watch last night. There's really no excuse for blowing a 9 point lead with the amount of talent Duke has on the team. Lazy execution, dumb fouls (and some bad calls too), missed free throws..just a horrible second half performance. I really thought up 9 at half we'd win the game going away. I thought UK got some lucky breaks in the first half and Duke didn't play their best, so I thought we'd extend the lead. But instead we slowly gave it away before completely collapsing at the end. I get people saying to not overreact early in the season. The problem is with seeding in the NCAAT. I'm tired of not being considered for a 1 seed because we don't have enough quality wins. So games like this end up really mattering to our March chances. I don't want a 4 seed and crazy difficult matchup in the second round.

They've got to find where to best get Cooper the ball in the best scoring position. Too many possessions start with him dribbling at the three point line. He can dribble, but he's not an elite ballhandler at this point. To me, his most lethal weapons are his length and athleticism. Isn't that best used around the basket rather than dribbling at the three point line?
 
Once the Jays said the game was getting physical in the second half is when it pivoted to holding and shoving by one team. Most were called but the illegal stepping screen injured a guy. Overall the better team lost to being “pulled into the mud.” This will always be the case when top teams get down against Duke. They think they can push around freshmen and force refs to “let them play.” And it’s something Coach S is going to have to prepare for better because it’s been the style of play that’s been a blueprint for success in big games the last few years. It’s also so physical that it’s contributing to the cramping that Coach is trying to solve for. Like the shoves in the back Maluach was taking. The answer in my humble opinion is to go deep on the bench, not shorten it. The talent on the bench is also the prevention/cure — plus there are some strong upper clansmen who can come in and punch back to backstop the freshmen. Overall, Duke looks great to the upside. I think the big stage venue and the physicality contributed to the poor outside shooting and some turnovers — but they’ll be more poised in future games. This Duke team is going to be a contender. Can’t wait for Jayhawks.
 
fgb said:
There's gonna be a game in the tournament when we're cold from 3 as well.
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In addition , in the first half we were cold from 3 and they started out blazing yet we still had a decent lead going into halftime on account of our points in the paint. We still gotta find ways to win but unfortunately didn't execute well in any facet down the stretch. Not even getting a shot off in those situations is especially painful. Still I see a lot of potential with this team. You can just see that we're a more talented team than Kentucky. I think having a hobbled man man really hurt us in this one.
 
We lost to good well coached team. I don't think Kentucky has been this well coached since Cal took the job. Yes, Pope did it by using the portal but what was he supposed to do. One big difference in the game was Kentucky guarded our 3-point shooters way better than we guarded theirs. I don't remember Kon getting one open look. As for those posters lumping Tyrese and Caleb together, that's not the case. Proctor played a really good game. He got the team going in the first half with a couple of big 3s. He was 2-5 on his attempts. On the other hand Caleb seems to have not improved his game other than his podcasts. He's still not a good defender, not a good FT shooter and not a good 3 point shooter. When Sion was injured, I thought this will really hurt the team and I was right. Jon had set Caleb down for several minutes at one point and the team played better, but with Sion's injury, he was forced to play Caleb. He also missed an important one and one at the end of the game that would have tied the game. He also missed 2 open 3s late in the game that were important. If we are to be a contender for the National Championship, Caleb is going to have to perform better. By the way, my son-in-law talked to a friend who was at the game, and he said the ball boys never wiped up the court after players went down. That could be a reason Cooper and Kon slipped and fell down so much.

GoDuke!
 
What was impressive about this team last night was that our shooting was atrocious, and we were down two key players, yet still were in position to win vs a really good team.

What's concerning to me is that, in a tie game with under a minute remaining, we went to the "get the ball to our best player and let him go to work" strategy that we've resorted to for over a decade in that situation. I cannot think of a single time that it has ever worked.

ISO ball makes some sense in the NBA, where ever player on the floor is elite. It's never made sense to me at the college level. Make it a point to have 2 or 3 end-of-game plays in your pocket, and run one of them there.
 
An illegal screen went uncalled, resulted in a 3-6 point swing for Kentucky, and injured Duke’s best source of speed and energy off the bench. All else aside, that’s basically the difference in this game.

I do think fatigue was the other big factor. The pace, the injuries, but also Kentucky’s constant movement on offense wore Duke down. I told my wife with about 5 minutes left that Duke was having to work harder on both ends of the court. That wasn’t true all game, but certainly was in crunch time.

They’ll learn and get better. They got a ton of really good looks from 3 that didn’t drop. Maluach held up well against another 7 footer and Kon held up well (imo) on defense in terms of staying in front of guys. Lots to be encouraged by here. Get well, Sion and Khaman.
 
The Metrics

We lost this game from 3. We still had a chance to win even with the shooting, but when you shoot as poorly as we shot and the opponent shoots reasonably well, it's tough to overcome.

OFFENSE
Possessions: 73.5 (a decent pace)
oRtg: 97.0 (109.2 adjusted; mediocre #96 adjusted, though again way too early to truly assess adjusted ratings)
eFG%: 42.3% (outstanding)
3pt%: 17.4% (awful)
2pt%: 50.0% (decent)
%threes: 32.4% (about right, but we just didn't make them)
FT rate: 23.9% (poor)
OR%: 27.3% (mediocre)
TO%: 9.4% (excellent)
a/to: 1.71 (decent)
%assisted: 42.9% (decent)
fast break pts: 12 (okay)

DEFENSE
dRtg: 103.7 (91.1 adjusted; good adjusted, would be #3, though still too early to say much about that)
eFG%: 48.4% (solid)
3pt%: 40.0% (poor)
2pt%: 40.5% (strong)
%threes: 40.3% (solid)
FT rate: 38.7% (okay)
DR%: 78.6% (very strong)
TO%: 13.5% (poor)
a/to: 1.70 (poor)
%assisted: 68.0% (poor)
stl%: 6.7% (poor)
blk%: 13.5% (2pt shots) (strong)
fast break pts: 10 (decent)

We won the rebounding battle and turnover battle, and shot 2s better. They won the FT battle and destroyed us in the 3pt shooting battle.

Rough night for Knueppel and Foster in particular. And not good game management down the stretch, where we basically just handed the ball to Flagg and asked him to save us.
 
fgb said:
What was impressive about this team last night was that our shooting was atrocious, and we were down two key players, yet still were in position to win vs a really good team.

What's concerning to me is that, in a tie game with under a minute remaining, we went to the "get the ball to our best player and let him go to work" strategy that we've resorted to for over a decade in that situation. I cannot think of a single time that it has ever worked.

ISO ball makes some sense in the NBA, where ever player on the floor is elite. It's never made sense to me at the college level. Make it a point to have 2 or 3 end-of-game plays in your pocket, and run one of them there.
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Tyus Jones? But yeah, I largely agree.
 
So many excuses in this thread. Did they shoot horribly? Yes. So what?

What was the score with 26 seconds left? Who had the ball?

2 possessions within the last 26 seconds and didn’t even get a shot. We saw similar issues last year.

Does any of this mean that Duke is destined for failure this year? Of course not. But it was still an awful loss in which they collapsed down the stretch.
 
Some of my thoughts on the game (in no particular order):

1. Kentucky took Knueppel out of the game. Aside from a brief stretch late in the first half where he got some transition baskets and UK put Brea on him, Knueppel just couldn't get any traction. And he was basically MIA in the second half: 1-8 FGA, 2 pts. For a team who built their offense around two guys, it is a real problem when the primary scorer gets shut down.
2. Flagg had a great game overall, but down the stretch he was just trying to do too much. That's not really his game.
3. The concerns about the team's backcourt remains relevant, as Foster was a no-show and Proctor played mostly off-ball.
4. Glad that Maluach appears to be okay. He was very effective when UK had a traditional big on the floor, ineffective when Carr moved to C.
5. I thought for sure we were going to win when we had the ball with about 35 seconds left in a tie game. But terrible execution on that play out of time out, and maybe not the best play design to begin with.
6. Pope made a switch late to have Oweh guard Flagg, and I think it affected Flagg. Oweh was able to get low on him and make Flagg uncomfortable off the dribble.

Young team, in their first taste of adversity. It didn't go well. Hopefully they can regroup quickly, as they have 3 more tough tests in the coming weeks.
 
Hate to say it, but I’ve seen this movie before. We have a young team that relies on three pointers and doesn’t respond well when a team gets overly physical (ie a team that punches you in the mouth). If our outside shooting is on, we win. If it’s bad, we lose. And that will happen - especially against good teams and/or in tough environments.

Meanwhile Scheyer doesn’t seem to learn from prior experience.

Why are we playing 8 guys this early in the season. Flagg was exhausted at the end of the game. He has been every game. How is that going to play out in late February and March. The play calling down the stretch was head scratching. But the worst, was calling the timeout with a tie game and 9 seconds between game and shot clock. Why do that? You let Kentucky regroup and then we never even got a shot off after that (two turnovers). And it was our last timeout. That, I’m sorry, was bad coaching. As was not having a defender on the inbounder and allowing the full court pass down the floor. Of course Flagg should have boxed out at the end (as a Youth Basketball coach you see 7th graders chase the ball like that all the time), but to be fair he was exhausted.

Frustrating. If we play anything like that, Arizona and Kansas will beat us into submission. I like this team. Our coach is an unbelievable recruiter. But if we don’t develop a bench, a sense of toughness and better coaching, this season has 19-13 and a 5 or 6 seed written all over it. So let’s go, Duke!
 
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