GREENSBORO, N.C. — The only word to describe Duke right now is scary. It’s not that the Blue Devils came out of nowhere, necessarily, but that they’re here, now, everything they thought they would be when the season started.
And they may have another level or two still left in them.
If Duke can play this comprehensively well against a solid Pittsburgh team that nearly won in Cameron, administering a 96-69 beating, while shooting 62% from the floor, what’s it going to look like if Dereck Lively II starts to become an offensive threat around the rim? (He had his fifth double-figure game of the season, and third in five games, Thursday.)
What’s Duke going to look like if Dariq Whitehead — supposed to be Duke’s most talented guard coming into the year, before injuries delayed and derailed his season — becomes an impact player, even just as a shooting threat off the bench? (Whitehead hasn’t made multiple 3s in a game since the win at Syracuse three weeks ago.)
There’s already a lot to this team, built on a foundation of defense and hustle in a more genuine way than so many of its recent predecessors, that it’s a little scary to think about how much upside there still may be offensively.
“I do think they can make a run,” Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel said. “They really can. They have size. They have athleticism. They’ve really gotten better defensively. If they can shoot the basketball like they shot it today, especially from 3, that makes them even more difficult to guard. They have an unbelievable defensive presence with Lively. They have a lot of weapons.”
It’s easy to understand why Duke has been overlooked nationally. It lost massive early season games to Kansas and Purdue, making the Blue Devils easy to dismiss without the gravitational force of Mike Krzyzewski on the sideline. While there’s no shortage of first-round talent, it’s not the kind of elite talent that rises to the top of the draft, and Duke’s had a lot of that lately.
There’s no Paolo Banchero, no Zion Williamson, no Marvin Bagley or Jayson Tatum or Brandon Ingram, none of the kind of guys who provoke an ESPN split screen with a draft analyst talking over the action — although some very smart NBA team is going to take Lively far earlier than everyone expects, because it doesn’t matter if 7-footers who can guard point guards have a jump shot or not.
Throw in a down year for the ACC — and that’s reality, not perception — and the spotlight that usually shines so brightly on Duke found other places to alight. Which, with all the tweaks and changes to the program Jon Scheyer wanted to implement and a team that needed time to find its footing and build an identity, may have been for the best.
The progression is apparent now, as is Scheyer’s vision and ability to implement it. The Blue Devils have always been able to count on their defense, but the questions about where the offense would come from have been answered. Putting the ball in Tyrese Proctor’s hands allowed Jeremy Roach to thrive. Kyle Filipowski has only gotten more confident. Surely Whitehead has more to contribute on offense, but perhaps Mark Mitchell and Lively do, too?
“Analytics and numbers, it can tell you what you’ve done, it can’t tell you what you can do,” Scheyer said. “I think for our group, you have to look at this season in stages. I don’t think it’s a coincidence how we’re putting it together on both ends where we’ve had the continuity with our lineup, we’ve had the continuity with our health. ...
“The offense has probably been a step behind our defense, but our defense has been elite. It’s been as good as anybody’s in the country, especially down the stretch here, and for us, we just need to know what the winning recipe is. We’ve learned it, and we need to continue to do that.”
It’s a team that’s getting better with every game, hasn’t lost* in a month (putting an asterisk next to the Virginia game) and absolutely throttled Pitt in the quarterfinals of the ACC tournament on Thursday, with a 16-point halftime lead that felt like 60 and a tournament-record 27 assists.
And the way Miami defended against Wake Forest in Thursday’s opener — indifferently, at best — the Hurricanes may not be ready for this despite having dealt Duke its last loss* a month ago.
“We’ve progressed mightily,” Mitchell said. “And little things on the court that we might not have been doing at the beginning of the year, we’re doing now. I think that’s a testament of having more experience going through certain things.”
Duke looked pretty good against Pitt. More than that, the Blue Devils looked scary, a fearsome realization of what they always hoped they could become.
