As Duke pushes the boundaries of its considerable potential, Blue Devils are only getting better
These are good times for Duke, when Jack White can make a languorous left-handed layup in the final minutes and his teammates on the bench all felt comfortable standing up to imitate it in various forms of mockery. The Blue Devils had the luxury of laughter at that point.
A year ago, Duke exited the tournament at this stage, coming apart at the seams. Saturday, the Blue Devils played what might have been their best 20-minute stretch of the season on either side of halftime.
“They played and looked like an NBA team out there, and there just wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it today,” Rhode Island coach Dan Hurley said, and when Duke plays the way it did in Saturday’s 87-62 win, there isn’t going to be a whole lot anyone can do about it.
It might not be the best basketball Duke can play, but it was the best basketball Duke has played, and the Blue Devils are peaking at the right time. They’re comfortable enough in their 2-3 zone – still, as curious as it is to parse those words when attached to Duke’s defense – to tweak it on the fly, extending the perimeter pressure in the second half against Iona in the first round, tightening the guards at the top of the lane to cut off Rhode Island’s veteran rim-attacking guards on Saturday.
The Blue Devils have gone from Zone 101 to Zone 201 and they may get to the Jim Boeheim graduate-level seminar before this tournament is over.
Meanwhile, the full array of NBA offensive skills continues to be available and on display. All five starters scored in double figures, with Wendell Carter Jr. scoring nine of Duke’s first 12 points and Trevon Duval looking for his shot early before Marvin Bagley III, silenced early, took over in the second half.
Even Javin DeLaurier had an impact sequence. Duke ran the same play three times in a row, with Carter feeding DeLaurier for back-door layups twice. Rhode Island figured out the third time not to leave DeLaurier open, words never before put in the same sentence. (Even DeLaurier acknowledged the absurdity of the circumstances, laughing when asked if he was surprised to be that open. No, he was not.)
“We did a lot of new things that are just coming together with our team, with how we’re sharing the ball now,” Duke guard Grayson Allen said. “It’s moving really quick. Those few possessions in the second half where Wendell hit Javin, we haven’t seen that this year, those are basketball plays with guys just making reads. That’s where our team’s getting better.”
When everything’s going right, even the friction ends in applause. Carter and Duval returned to the bench for a second-half timeout in a heated argument and had to be kept apart by their teammates. By the time the timeout ended, they had hugged to an ovation from the families seated behind the bench. Needless to say, that kind of thing has torn apart young teams, and not just Duke, in the past. This one was able to laugh about it.
“In the heat of the moment of the game, we're yelling, screaming, whatever,” Duval said. “It can get intense.”
This a team at the peak of its confidence and power that heads to Omaha to face one of two teams – Michigan State or Syracuse – it already has beaten this season by a combined 23 points. It’s also a team that has successfully navigated the first weekend of the tournament, unlike the team that beat it out for the ACC title, unlike some of its own predecessors.
If anyone has an idea of what Virginia's Tony Bennett is going through, it’s Duke's Mike Krzyzewski.
“My heart goes out to him,” Krzyzewski said. “We've lost in the first round a couple of times, and we've lost to teams that were deserving of winning. You know, like UMBC was deserving of winning, just like when we lost, C.J. McCollum was pretty good and Lehigh deserved to win. Mercer was really good and they deserved to win.”
Duke deserved to win Saturday, leaving no doubt about its ability or focus, leaving nothing to chance. Rhode Island is a gritty, veteran team with talented guards, the kind that traditionally pulls off tournament upsets. The Blue Devils even missed 3-pointers early and turned the ball over repeatedly, the kind of miscues that traditionally lead to tournament upsets.
None of that mattered, as Duke continued to push the boundaries of its considerable potential.
“That was the best display of basketball I've seen played against one of my Rhode Island teams in six years,” Hurley said. “Those guys were locked in today.”
Did what happened to Virginia crystalize Duke’s effort Saturday? Maybe. Maybe not. The Blue Devils, despite the late-season losses to Virginia Tech and North Carolina, have been trending this way for a while. They were dominating before Bagley finally took his first shot. Their defense has gone from an emergency stop-gap to a strength.
There was nothing Rhode Island, and perhaps not anyone else, could do about that. And the Blue Devils just laughed their way through to the next round, to the next weekend, to the next step.
Sports columnist Luke DeCock: 919-829-8947, ldecock@newsobserver.com, @LukeDeCock
This story was originally published March 17, 2018 at 6:31 PM with the headline "As Duke pushes the boundaries of its considerable potential, Blue Devils are only getting better."