On paper, losing at home to Pittsburgh is a black eye for Duke. But basketball isn’t played on paper.
What if I told you a favored basketball team would welcome an underdog into its home gym down its best guard and its best defender. What if the former was also that favored team’s senior leader, and the latter was that team’s only true power forward playing significant minutes. What if I told you that, after tip-off, the underdog’s best player would shoot 7-for-7 from three, including multiple highly contested low percentage looks, and a freshman averaging just seven points a game would explode for 17.
In isolation, that would make for a bad 30 for 30 short. There wouldn’t be much drama: you’d expect that road underdog, clearly playing their best basketball, to pull off the upset against the depleted favorite.
The only reason the result is newsworthy is because the favorite was Duke, the pre-season No. 2 team in the country, and the home gym was Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Now, make no mistake: this was a bad loss for the Blue Devils, one that could cost them a seed-line (or two) come March and makes a regular-season ACC Championship an uphill climb. A truly elite team would probably find a way to overcome those obstacles and beat an inferior opponent at home. But the world, even in sports, isn’t black and white: that can all be true while also recognizing that the unusual circumstances mean the sky isn’t falling.
Jeremy Roach was playing as well as any guard in the ACC not named RJ Davis before tweaking his knee last week. Mark Mitchell may not be Duke’s best player, but he is their most indispensable, especially on the defensive end. Losing two such starters is a hard burden for all but the absolute best teams to overcome.
Perhaps that last sentence is why so many Blue Devil fans are in distress this morning: the realization that, right now, this team isn’t amongst the country’s “absolute best.” It’s frustrating, because they should be on paper: this year’s team returned the most production in recent memory, including a potential lottery pick, from an ACC Tournament winning team.
But nothing has been smooth and easy for this team after all those players chose to return. Duke lost incoming freshman Mackenzie Mgbako to Indiana for undisclosed reasons, a player who may have been better suited than any currently on the roster to fill Mitchell’s shoes. The Blue Devils thought they had filled the defensive chasm left by Dereck Lively II’s departure to the NBA with a coveted transfer, but academic issues reportedly prevented Ernest Udeh Jr. from ending up a Blue Devil. Kyle Filipowski missed most of the summer rehabbing from significant surgery, while Mitchell himself recovered from the knee injury that kept him out of Duke’s NCAA Tournament loss to Tennessee. Then Tyrese Proctor went down with a sprained ankle in a disappointing December loss at Georgia Tech, an injury he admits he’s still recovering from.
Add the injury woes that kept Roach and Mitchell out of Saturday night’s loss on top off all that and some important context comes into focus: this Duke team hasn’t yet fully cohered yet. The Blue Devils have played 5 different starting lineups. Their longest stretch with the same starting unit is just eight games, a deceiving metric considering that Proctor returned from injury, playing starter’s minutes as the sixth man, midway through that stretch.
This Duke team, while extremely talented and one of the school’s more experienced groups in the one-and-done era, has been scrambling all season. They’re a speedboat with a defective hull: while to the casual observer they look like they should be racing by the competition, in reality they’re constantly working to plug holes below deck.
The good news is that NCAA basketball is unique, perhaps in all of sports, in that it’s a sprint disguised as a marathon. Come March, the marathon of a long season gets distilled down into seeding in a single-elimination tournament, the sprint that decides the champion. If the Blue Devils can find a way to permanently fix the hull of their metaphorical speedboat by then, losses like last night’s to Pittsburgh won’t matter, nor will whether they end up a 2 or a 5 seed. One need look no further than last year’s National Champions to see that: UConn finished the season with eight losses (including a stretch starting in the end of December in which they lost six of eight games) and was a four seed in the NCAA Tournament, but won each of their six tournament games by double digits.
Duke is in better shape now than last year’s UConn team, as by all reports the injuries that have derailed the Blue Devils will get better soon. They’re in far better shape than last year’s North Carolina squad, who entered the season with a similarly lofty pre-season ranking before historically collapsing.
And, lest we forget, even the best Duke teams have suffered bad losses like last night’s: the 2019 Zion Williamson led squad lost at home to Syracuse in an eerily similar game where the Blue Devils were missing Cam Reddish and lost Tre Jones to injury in the opening minutes; the 2015 National Champions lost back-to-back games to unranked opponents in January, including a 16 point home loss.
Duke is still the same team that won eight straight games, including two road contests and a neutral site victory over a Top 10 team, before last night. One disappointing loss, when the team was at the weakest it’ll likely be all year and the opponent played it’s best basketball, doesn’t change that.
All that matters is that the speed boat is up and running at peak efficiency come March.
