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WINSTON-SALEM, NC – We’ve reached the point in the college basketball season where the question needs to be asked.
Is Duke really this good or is the ACC just bad?
Let’s just say that the answer can be yes for both options.
The ACC is bad. Historically bad. So bad that out of the league’s 18 teams, 8 are saddled with overall records below .500 and ranked 111th or worse in the NCAA’s NET rankings as the calendar races toward February.
But none of that has any bearing on the Blue Devils’ legitimacy as a national championship contender.
Jon Scheyer’s No. 2-ranked team showed how good it can be back on Dec. 4 when it took down Auburn, the team currently ranked No. 1, in an early-season clash of titans at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
As impressive as that victory was, Saturday’s 63-56 win at Wake Forest might have provided an even more significant glimpse of Duke’s ceiling once tournament time arrives.
And not in the way it’s likely to be perceived nationally.
Yes, the Blue Devils were held to their lowest point total of the season, recorded more turnovers than assists and had to overcome a second-half deficit for the first time in nearly 2 months against an opponent most view as just another speed bump on the way to running table and going 20-0 in the ACC.
But no, it’s not because they sleepwalked their way through a late-January road game they were supposed to have won by more.
They were put into a precarious situation against a 15-5 Wake team much better than the analytics suggest.
Punched in the mouth at the start of the second half.
Down 6 with 10 minutes to go.
Nothing going right on either end of the court with a hostile sellout crowd willing the home team on.
It’s a similar situation to the one that got the best of last year’s team, leading to a memorable court storm that resulted in a controversial injury to star Kyle Filipowski.
Only this time new star Cooper Flagg and his teammates answered the challenge. They didn’t have their “A” game. Probably not their “B” game, either.
And they still managed to win a game they could easily have lost to extend the nation’s longest winning streak to 13 while improving to 17-2. Which is more than No. 9 Kentucky, No. 11 Oregon and No. 13 Texas A&M, all of whom were upset, can say this weekend.
Deacons coach Steve Forbes had a simple reason to explain how Duke survived his team’s best shot and why it’s a team capable of making a deep run into March and April.
“Their leading scorer last year was the first pick of the second round (of the NBA Draft),” he said, missing on Filipowski’s selection by the Utah Jazz by one pick. “This guy (Flagg) will be the first pick in the first round. Big difference.”
That there is.
But there’s plenty more to the Blue Devils than their highest-profile player.
Even though Flagg’s uber-competitiveness is contagious and he did score 11 of his 24 points during the Blue Devils’ 24-11 run to close out the game over the final 8:09, he had plenty of help in dragging his team over the finish line on Saturday.
Not all of it came from his teammates on the court.
Scheyer, now in his fourth season after taking over from Mike Krzyzewski, showed his growth as a coach by pulling a page from his mentor’s playbook during a pivotal junction of the second half.
With Wake gaining confidence and Duke looking flustered in the midst of a 23-4 Deacons run, Scheyer scrapped his trademark man-to-man defense for a zone that took more than just the opposition by surprise.
Asked by his coach if he’d ever played zone before during a postgame media session, Flagg shook his head and said “nope.”
Teammate Kon Knueppel had a similar reaction.
It was a bold move. But it worked. Not only did the Deacons score only once on the 6 possessions Duke went to the zone. The Blue Devils answered with points each time on the other end of the floor to change the momentum and regain control.
“We’ve kept it in our back pocket just in case,” Scheyer said of the defensive surprise. “It’s good to have a curveball.”
It’s an option that came in handy against a bubble team in January. But it could be a lifesaver against an elite national contender in the Sweet 16 or Elite 8.
So is the composure the Blue Devils showed in the face of some rare adversity.
“We have to be in these situations,” Scheyer said. “It wasn’t panic mode. We’ve talked way more about the mental preparation and the toughness you have to have in these environments. And these guys executed. So I think it was an important step for us.”
Even more important, perhaps, than running up another lopsided score on another bad team from a bad conference.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.