After rout against Miami, perfect ACC start, Duke’s biggest challenge might be boredom
The timeout came about two and a half minutes into the second half Tuesday night, with Duke’s 24-point halftime lead down to the 19 and Blue Devils coach Jon Scheyer having seen enough. To be clear, neither Scheyer nor anybody inside Cameron Indoor Stadium thought this was in danger of actually becoming some kind of competitive game.
It wasn’t as if Duke was falling apart. It wasn’t as if Miami, arguably the ACC’s worst team in a league with too many contenders for that distinction, had any chance of actually finding a way back in it. But still. Scheyer saw this sort of thing Saturday, when he said it was “human nature” that his team let up against Notre Dame, and now against Miami he thought he might be seeing something similar.
It was a small moment in a mostly-forgettable, ho-hum, just-another-Duke-beatdown of a night. There was little drama, neither at the beginning nor the end nor at any other time, to the Blue Devils’ 89-54 victory. The timeout early in the second half, though, just might have reflected their greatest challenge, both Tuesday and for the rest of this ACC season: How to avoid complacency.
How to fight the boredom game after not-all-that-competitive game.
It’s not supposed to be this way in the ACC, which was once the nation’s premier basketball conference but is now a bloated, mediocre (to put it kindly) unrecognizable version of itself. And Tuesday night at Cameron didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know: Duke is good — Final Four and national championship good, to be clear — and Miami, well, looked like a team that has lost 13 of its past 14 games, and whose head coach recently quit amid all that losing.
Miami is bad, yes, but nights like this are likely to be the norm for Duke. Maybe not quite winning by 35 all the time. But winning in comfort? With ease? That’s pretty much been the pattern during the Blue Devils’ 7-0 conference start, outside of a few moments here and there. One of those came Saturday, when Notre Dame turned an 18-point deficit into a two-possession game late.
And another came Tuesday early in the second half, however briefly.
“Something we’ve talked about is it doesn’t matter if you’ve won your first six games or lost your first six games,” Scheyer said after his team’s victory against the Hurricanes. “It doesn’t entitle you to anything in this game.”
That’s a message he’s tried to impart amid this stretch of relatively easy victories: Don’t get spoiled.
To put it another way, he said, “We just talked about having a killer instinct.
“You know — having our foot on the gas.”
Soon enough Tuesday night, the Blue Devils’ lead was back up to 25, and growing. From there, it pretty much continued to go as expected: Duke shining with its depth (six players with at least eight points; four of them in double-figures, led by Kon Knueppel’s 25) and dominating in every conceivable aspect.
As feeble as the Hurricanes were, and are, it’s becoming fair to wonder whether the gap between Duke and the rest of the conference is as wide as it has ever been. Or to pose the question a more accurate way: When was the last time there was this large of a gulf between the ACC’s best team and even its second-best team (whichever team that might be)?
We’re in mid-January and not only is Duke the ACC’s only ranked team, at No. 3 in the Associated Press top 25, but only two other league members (Louisville and Clemson) are even receiving votes in the poll. As good as the Blue Devils are, the gap between them and the rest of the conference has never been as wide in large part because the league has never been this bad.
Duke is almost assuredly headed for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, but would Pitt, Clemson, Louisville or [insert team here that could contend for second place in the ACC — maybe North Carolina?] even be a No. 7 seed at this point? Doubtful.
Bill Courtney, Miami’s interim head coach after Jim Larrañaga’s abrupt (if not understandable) retirement last month, sounded beleaguered and beaten down Tuesday night during what had to be one of shortest postgame press conferences in Cameron Indoor Stadium history. He said his team had been out-coached and out-played and “out-everythinged.”
The Blue Devils are going to continue to do that to a lot of conference opponents over the next couple months. Probably most of them. They’re just that good, for one, and the competition is just that poor. About six and a half minutes into Tuesday night, the Blue Devils led by 10. And a little less than 10 minutes after that, they led by 27.
And they still had about 25 minutes of game time to kill.
“I think it would be impossible for this group to get bored,” said Cooper Flagg, who scored an ACC freshman-record 42 points against Notre Dame and finished with 13 points, seven rebounds and six assists against Miami. “We have such a competitive group. Everybody is so hungry to get better every single day that I think we’re more just focused on just getting better.”
And there’s the rub for Flagg and his gifted teammates: On a lot of nights, the challenge is going to have to come from within. They’re going to have to push themselves, and each other. The ACC, once so rigorous and for so long accustomed to preparing its members for March, isn’t going to offer much resistance.
This story was originally published January 15, 2025 at 8:40 AM.
