Duke just waxed a Big Ten team by 43 … still think the Blue Devils are fattening up on bad ACC competition?
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If you’re of the opinion that Duke really isn’t that good because it’s in the ACC and it doesn’t play anybody, what happened at Madison Square Garden on Saturday probably isn’t going to change your mind.
There are too many excuses to explain away the Blue Devils’ 110-67 dominance of Illinois.
That’s the Big Ten Illinois. Not some directional version of it served up for a ritual crushing like some early-season sacrificial cupcake.
You’ll point out that Illini are a team trending toward the bubble. That they’ve been beset by injuries all season and illness recently. That they had a bad night in which they missed a lot of open looks, including 24 of their 26 3-point attempts. Or that Duke was playing in the friendly confines of “Cameron North,” its home away from home.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
If you don’t see it or worse, if you can’t bring yourself to acknowledge it, fine.
But if there was any doubt before, there shouldn’t be now. This Duke team is something special. And it continues to raise its ceiling as it gears up to make a deep run into March and April. Maybe all the way to the finish line.
Saturday’s beatdown of Illinois wasn’t just a win.
It was a statement.
Not that kind of statement. The Blue Devils already took care of that back in December ago when they took down Auburn. The team currently perched at the top of the national polls.
This was a statement that screams even louder than the balance of 7 different players scoring in double figures, the 28 assists on 40 field goals, the 44-30 rebounding advantage, the 52% 3-point accuracy or the lopsided final margin of victory.
It was a performance that showed that Duke is the kind of team that uses its missteps as learning experiences to help it grow rather than allowing them to become a blueprint for future opponents to follow.
There were few, if any, of the glaring defensive lapses that helped beat them at Clemson. And instead of getting bored, lifting off the accelerator and allowing the opposition to make a prolonged late run as the Blue Devils did after getting up by 32 against rival North Carolina 3 weeks ago, this time they kept the hammer down until the bitter end.
The 43-point margin of victory was Duke’s largest in a regular-season neutral-site game since the ACC was formed in 1953. And the loss was the worst in Illinois’ history.
And it did so with a key member of its rotation, rebounding and defensive specialist Maliq Brown, on the bench in street clothes nursing a dislocated shoulder.
“We’re coming together really well right now,” star freshman Cooper Flagg said afterward in a courtside interview with FOX Sports reporter Allison Williams. “We’re at our best when the ball is moving and we’re getting a lot of assists. We’re playing some pretty good basketball right now and we’re going to try to keep getting better.”
One way to bring about that improvement is to keep finding challenges even when none appear to be needed. That’s what coach Jon Scheyer did for his team by playing this game against a high-level nonconference opponent instead of taking the week off during the break in its ACC schedule.
It’s a trick he learned from his mentor Mike Krzyzewski, who played teams such as Georgetown, St. John’s and UCLA around this time of the year to help give the Blue Devils a taste of what was to come once tournament time arrived.
The 2010 national championship team Scheyer played on had a home game against Tulsa in late February. The 2015 team that won Duke’s most recent title prepped with a win against St. John’s at MSG in a game that gave Coach K his 1,000th career victory.
Scheyer took the concept one step further than the venue and opponent on Saturday by playing the game with a Wilson EVO NXT ball, the kind the NCAA uses for postseason play, rather than Duke’s customary Nike Elite model.
“Those kinds of things may seem small,” Scheyer said during a pregame media session on Thursday, adding that “I think it makes a ton of sense. … It’s great for a team to get a small taste outside the (conference) bubble we’re in.”
And in doing so, give the haters who still insist Duke really isn’t that good one less thing to hold against it.
Award-winning columnist Brett Friedlander has covered the ACC and college basketball since the 1980s.
