Effort arrives but performance wanes as struggling Duke loses third in a row
Three ACC road games became three Duke losses this month.
That came to be because three open 3-pointers by three different Blue Devils in the final two minutes of Saturday’s games at Louisville were all off the mark.
Duke executed its offense well enough that Joey Baker’s shot would have given it a lead. Looking for a tie later, the same was true when Wendell Moore missed a 3-pointer and, after Duke secured an offensive rebound, DJ Steward misfired on another with 11 seconds left.
Louisville left the KFC Yum! Center with a 70-65 win and, combined with Duke’s 74-67 loss at Virginia Tech and a 79-73 loss at Pittsburgh, the Blue Devils carry their first three-game losing streak since 2016.
The difference in this latest loss was the Blue Devils didn’t have long stretches of poor play. That’s what happened when both Virginia Tech and Pitt built double-digit leads over Duke before holding on to win.
“The team is definitely frustrated,” Moore said Saturday. “But we feel like we played one of our best games of the year. This is the first game we actually, really competed most of the game.”
That sentence says plenty about this Duke team. Clearly, it is not possessed with the talent to overwhelm opponents, like the team two years ago with Zion Williamson and RJ Barrett that won the ACC championship and finished 32-6.
These Blue Devils (5-5, 3-3 ACC) will match that team’s loss total with its next defeat.
Still, they wear the same uniforms, play in the same famed arena and are coached by the same Hall of Famer. So they are held to high standards. It’s not fair but that’s what the players signed up for when they chose to play at Duke.
Though they aren’t as talented, this group of Blue Devils just now — in late January — put together a game where they felt good about how they competed for 40 minutes.
Their accomplished coach, Mike Krzyzewski, is still figuring out what this team can do and why they can’t play good basketball more often.
Frustratingly, he sees different things on different nights.
Matthew Hurt is among the top players in the ACC this season. The sophomore scored 24 points to give Duke a chance to win on Saturday. But he fouled out with 1:50 to play, meaning he wasn’t on the court when the Blue Devils went scoreless on their final four possessions.
Jalen Johnson has so many skills he’s projected as a first-round pick if he declares for this year’s NBA Draft. He was spectacular at Pittsburgh, scoring 24 points with 15 rebounds, seven assists and, notably, no turnovers in 33 minutes of play.
But Saturday at Louisville, he turned the ball over five times in the game’s first 11 minutes. He threw three bad passes and lost control of the ball two more times. He played so poorly he sat for long stretches of the second half despite the nip-and-tuck nature of the game.
The 6-9 freshman finished with nine points, hitting 4-of-8 shots, and six turnovers in just 20 minutes of play.
“He didn’t play well tonight,” Krzyzewski said. “He could never get out of it. He could just never get out of it. He’s a human being so you’re not going to play well all of the time, but if you can correct whatever you are doing not so well while the game is going on that is a key thing. We were not able to do that. We need him. We need him.”
Another freshman, guard Jeremy Roach, went scoreless at Louisville after he’d scored 11 points or more in each of Duke’s last six games while averaging 14 points in those games.
Defensively, Duke mixed in its 3-2 zone defense heavily on Saturday before going back to the traditional man-to-man during stretches of the second half. Does Krzyzewski want to be teaching a different defense on the fly in late January? Of course not. But that’s what this team needs as it searches for something, anything, to form a foundation.
“It’s something that you would’ve wanted to do in November in a lot of non-conference games or exhibitions and have a few different things you would do defensively,” Krzyzewski said. “We’re trying to get that done on January 23, right now.”
The result is a .500 team that will have heavy lifting to do in February and March to make the NCAA tournament.
Krzyzewski praised his team’s effort Saturday, saying the Blue Devils played “winning basketball” even though they fell a few shots short. That’s far different than Tuesday at Pittsburgh when he declared their play “unacceptable” when Pitt jumped to a big lead early.
Now, of course, Duke has put forth that effort — you know the one where it actually really competes for an entire game — more consistently.
Georgia Tech and Clemson are up next at Cameron Indoor Stadium in games Tuesday and Saturday. Past Duke teams have run roughshod over teams from those schools when playing in Durham.
This isn’t that kind of Duke team, though. This is one that doesn’t know what it will get from whom from game to game.