Duke basketball goes to Notre Dame and gets its groove back in ACC opener
Duke got its groove back on Wednesday. Or, in Mike Krzyzewski’s preferred parlance, the Blue Devils found their verve.
It had as much to do with who was on the court with Duke as Duke itself, a trip to Notre Dame being more hospitable territory after than the meat-grinder that left the Blue Devils looking so out of sorts against Big Ten title challengers Michigan State and Illinois, at home no less.
It’s impossible to separate one from the other at this early point in the season, to separate who Duke is from who Duke has played. But given a chance against a different kind of opponent, Duke looked more … like Duke, leading by as many as 17 late on the way to a 75-65 win.
Did Duke look more comfortable at both ends of the court? Absolutely. Was that because of Duke making progress or because the degree of difficulty was that much lower? Both were true.
It wasn’t as simple as merely making shots. D.J. Steward was jab-stepping his way to open 3-pointers. Matthew Hurt had the space to bang in 2-point jumpers. By the final minutes, Duke was throwing sidearm back-door passes under the basket and playing with the kind of alacrity that had been all too lacking in its two high-visibility losses.
“We had, I think, eight days to get our minds right, to get our bodies right for this game,” said Hurt, who had a team-high 18 points.
We learned in the opening weeks that Duke is not ready to join the nation’s elite, if it ever will be this season. It was given a chance to measure itself by those standards and came up wanting. Michigan State and Illinois are the kind of teams that can make anyone look bad. They both have the combination of physicality and defensive stubbornness that leads to forced shots and ugly turnovers. It’s what they do best.
Notre Dame can make people look bad, too, but it’s because the Irish at their best can play with an offensive fluidity that’s as akin to jazz as it is basketball, free-flowing basketball with Mike Brey as the quirky conductor. But not this particular Notre Dame team, not at this point anyway: The Irish have now lost 24 straight to ranked teams.
Same as was the case with Duke, it was hard to tell how much of it was Notre Dame being clunky on offense and Duke digging in on defense — there was a lot of both going on — but other than Dane Goodwin’s unerring shooting, there just wasn’t much of anything available for the Irish.
Things went well for Duke from the start and only got better. The Blue Devils had balance — four players in double figures, seven with a steal — and never even looked like they missed Jalen Johnson, to this point their best player, now out indefinitely with a foot injury.
Duke needed to show progress, and did.
“We’re not any kind of juggernaut,” Krzyzewski said. “We can be a good team. In order to be a very good team, it’s going to take some seasoning. It’s not like the teams we’ve had past number of years. It’s got to be brought along a little different way.”
For all the parsing of opponents, there was still no guarantee Duke would be able to play this well, especially without Johnson, against another ACC team and not one of the canceled nonconference games that were presumed to be walkovers anyway. There was still something to prove here, a measure to take, a standard to meet.
And it was: Whatever questions Duke could answer against Notre Dame were not only answered, but answered with flair. With verve, even.
This story was originally published December 16, 2020 at 11:33 PM.
