Duke ready to restore the Cameron Crazies’ roar in Coach K’s final season
Mike Krzyzewski prefers to forget how everything was done in his Duke basketball program during the strictest protocols spawned by the pandemic last season.
“People ask what we learned,” Krzyzewski told The News & Observer this summer. “Nothing that I’m going to take forward. There’s not a thing that we did that I think is better than what did do (before).”
The inability to prepare players in the usual manner played a major role in Duke going 13-11 and missing the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1995.
The Blue Devils suffered five of those 11 losses at Cameron Indoor Stadium, meaning their famed home-court advantage (84.6% all-time winning percentage) had been rendered impotent.
While preparing this year’s team for the first two home games of this season, Friday against Army West Point and Saturday against Campbell, Krzyzewski used the occasion to take one peek back at last season.
“He stressed the fact that they lost five times at home last season,” Duke freshman guard Trevor Keels said Thursday. “That’s big. Home-court advantage is big. So we’ve got to keep moving forward and get these two wins coming up.”
Krzyzewski’s words to the Blue Devils came on the heels of an important win on Tuesday night. No. 9 Duke lead nearly the entire game in topping No. 10 Kentucky 79-71 in the Champions Classic at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
Two players who had nothing to do with last season’s struggles, Keels and fellow freshman Paolo Banchero, combined to score 47 points for the Blue Devils in the win.
Now they and their teammates are charged with restoring Cameron’s roar, which was silenced a year ago not by the team’s mediocre play but by the university health and safety protocols that prohibited spectators from attending games.
A year later, cases and deaths due to COVID-19 have diminished, largely due to the vaccines against the virus. The stands will be packed with screaming fans again, with anyone entering Cameron Indoor Stadium required to show either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test.
The Blue Devils are ready to hear them cheer again while giving them plenty of reasons to do so.
“We’re a great team,” Banchero said following the Kentucky game. “We’re going to play together. We’re going to play hard all 40 minutes. And, yeah, I mean, we’re going to play like Duke.”
Strong defense in win over Kentucky
The Blue Devils played with a toughness and swagger unseen for most of last season. The plays Keels, Banchero and others made on offense were examples of that, but the way Duke played defense reminded of some of Krzyzewski’s vintage teams.
Kentucky shot 37.7% while turning the ball over 13 times to produce a points-per-possession rate of just 0.76, according to Synergy’s advanced analysis.
By comparison, Duke scored 0.98.
The Blue Devils played strong transition defense, with the Wildcats scoring just seven points off Duke’s nine turnovers. According to Synergy, Kentucky had 16 transition possessions and tallied a mere nine points on them. The Wildcats hit only three of 12 shots in transition while turning the ball over three times.
“Transition defense,” Duke center Theo John said Thursday, “you’ve got to have that in the college game. A lot of it starts with communication, just the will to stop a team. We are really prideful on the defensive end. Defense travels and that’s something, we are going to try to keep with us and build upon for the remainder of the season.”
If the Blue Devils indeed continue to play defense like that, their fans will have plenty to cheer about home and road this season.
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 6:30 AM.