General20
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Everybody has their own reason for why they hate Duke. Mine is philosophical. Over the history of basketball there have been many players and teams who got calls they shouldn't have, but Duke is the only team I can think of (in any sport) that actually structured their game plan around getting calls other teams don't.
Its rare to find a college age player who is both an exceptional athlete and an exceptional shooter, and when you do find one, you know they are not going to stay in college very long. Generally coaches have to choose what percentage of shooters they want to recruit, and what percentage of athletes. Coach K, always recruits the shooter. You will never see a great shot blocker who brings little offense, or an athletic guard who can't shoot playing for Duke. They always have the benefit of five highly skilled offensive players on the court. This should mean that they pay for it defensively, but they haven't. So how has Duke managed to be an above average defensive team for years, with unathletic guards, little size, and no shot blockers? Of course, we all know the answer. Flopping.
We have all seen Greg Paulus or Wojo playing pressure defense and over-playing passing lanes like Gary Payton. Any time you apply that much pressure you are going to force a few turnovers. The problem, of course, is, neither Greg Paulus or Wojo (or Cook or Dawkins on this years team) are elite athletes like Gary Payton was, and opposing guards blow past them with regularity. Without the benefit of a shot blocker, Duke's response has always been to post a player in the lane and have him flop, and its worked.
For years Coach K has been able to have his cake and eat it too, by recruiting highly skilled offensive players, and having them play pressure defense they are not athletic enough excel at, because officials consistently bail them out with offensive fouls that are not really fouls but flops. I'm sure no coach in the game would turn down the advantages Duke has, but I like to think few coaches would go as far as completely structuring their defense towards exploiting those kinds of calls.
Long story short, I don't have a lot of respect for Coach K's accomplishments. I do, however, have a tremendous amount of respect for his ability to teach basketball. Whether you hate Duke (or really hate Duke) you have to admit that year in and year out their players do an exceptional job of executing the game plan Coach K has for them. As good a teacher of the game as Jamie Dixon is, Coach K is better - in fact, he is the best – and he has a week to teach his players how to best attack Syracuse.
All coaches at the college level have game plans that will work in theory. Team's lose for two reasons. Either the coach cannot teach the players what he wants them to do effectively, or the players are not able to physically execute the game plan.
There are two things I know about Duke. One, Coach K will do a great job teaching his players how to execute against Syracuse. Two, Duke's players have the skill and talent necessary to execute his game plan.
This leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Duke is almost definitely going to score a bunch of points on Syracuse. They are built perfectly for it. They are arguably the best shooting team in the country. They will have four or five shooters on the court at all times. They will spread us out. All their players are skilled enough to handle the ball, or pass, and basically make the proper play in the space they will be given (space SU will have to give them if Syracuse plans on covering all Duke's shooters).
Syracuse is going to have to score efficiently and go relatively drought free on offense, like they needed to (and did) against Pittsburgh, if they want to win. If the game is a blow out, I'm afraid Duke will be the winning team, and the cause will be poor shooting and a long offensive drought by Syracuse.
The really interesting match up in this game is Syracuse's offense against Duke's defense. This is an especially interesting year for Duke's defense in general, because fewer charges are being called. Who would have thought that boring basketball games (and low ratings) would derail Duke? For me its great to see Coach K finally pay the tab for recruiting a bunch of shooters who are not suited to play defense. I believe this is by far the most talented Duke team in decades, yet they have four losses (including two bad ones to Clemson and Notre Dame) because early in the year, they didn't play any defense at all.
But everything changed for Duke four games ago. In that four game winning streak, no team came within 15 points (their average margin of victory is 23) and nobody scored more than 65 points (their average number of points allowed is 56).
So it seems like Duke has cured their defensive woes, but after taking a close look, I am not so sure that is the case.
Pitt shot 41% from the field which is not great, but they shot 41% from three, and got to the free throw line 24 times, which makes for a good overall offensive performance. Duke won, not because of their defense, but because their offense went absolutely crazy hitting 52% from three even though they shot 25 of them.
Florida State shot 50% from the field against Duke but still managed to lose by 20 mostly because Duke shot an INSANE 43 free throws (home cooking?).
NC State lost to duke by a whopping 35 points but shot 48% from the field which is way above their season average. Again, Duke's offense went crazy, shooting 50% from the field and 46% from three.
Miami is the only team out of the four to put up poor offensive numbers, but Miami has yet to put up good offensive numbers at any point this season (including games against mid majors, several of which they lost) so I'm not sure how much credit you can give to Duke's defense.
From a superficial perspective Duke's defense looks to have improved, and it has improved from the abomination it was early in the year, but its still not very good. Their winning streak has mostly been the product of unbelievably good, record-breaking offense.
As an interesting side note, Syracuse has played unbelievably good, record-breaking defense. So what happens when an unbelievably good, record-breaking offense plays an unbelievably good, record-breaking defense? If you can figure out the answer to that question you can make a lot of money this weekend, because you will know how both the SU/Duke game and the Super Bowl play out. I see a lot of similarities between the two games.
Back to my original point, Duke still does not play very good defense. Their guards (and their forwards) are going to pressure the ball (and not get many turnovers out of it thanks to Tyler Ennis) and they can be beat to the basket where flopping does not get called like it once did and Duke has no shot blocker. I expect Ennis, Fair, and Grant to take the ball to the hole with regularity, and I expect them to draw a lot of fouls and generally have success.
Keys to the Game:
Duke's three point shooting. Its safe to say they are going to take a lot of threes and make a lot of threes, but we need to hope they only make thirty to forty percent. When you shoot close to (or over) fifty percent from three, like Duke did against Pitt, you aren't going to lose often.
Syracuse's Free Throw Shooting. Syracuse fans have been worrying about losing games at the free throw line ever since it cost us a title in '87. The funny thing is, we have lost maybe 1 or 2 games that way in the 28 years since. The best free throw shooting teams never turn out to be the best teams, and I happen to think free throw shooting causes way too much needless worry for fans. But in this game it might be very important. I am assuming that Duke scores a lot, and I am assuming Syracuse drives the lane a lot and as a result gets fouled a lot. If those two assumptions are true, Syracuse can't afford lost possessions due to missed free throws. They need to keep hitting from the line, and keep scoring, if they are going to win. Jerami Grant is especially likely to get to the line, so I see his free throw shooting as especially important.
Rebounding. Syracuse is probably going to have to win the rebounding battle to win the game. They can't afford to give Duke many second chance points, and Duke can be prone to giving up offensive boards which is something Syracuse is exceptionally good at exploiting.
Predictions:
It will take 70 points to win this game. This is a bold prediction considering nobody since Nova has even gotten into the 60's against us, and only Cal and Fordham early in the year got above 70.
Cooney spreads the defense, but doesn't get a lot of shots. Syracuse's offense will be focused on scoring around the basket.
Christmas scores in double figures.
Its rare to find a college age player who is both an exceptional athlete and an exceptional shooter, and when you do find one, you know they are not going to stay in college very long. Generally coaches have to choose what percentage of shooters they want to recruit, and what percentage of athletes. Coach K, always recruits the shooter. You will never see a great shot blocker who brings little offense, or an athletic guard who can't shoot playing for Duke. They always have the benefit of five highly skilled offensive players on the court. This should mean that they pay for it defensively, but they haven't. So how has Duke managed to be an above average defensive team for years, with unathletic guards, little size, and no shot blockers? Of course, we all know the answer. Flopping.
We have all seen Greg Paulus or Wojo playing pressure defense and over-playing passing lanes like Gary Payton. Any time you apply that much pressure you are going to force a few turnovers. The problem, of course, is, neither Greg Paulus or Wojo (or Cook or Dawkins on this years team) are elite athletes like Gary Payton was, and opposing guards blow past them with regularity. Without the benefit of a shot blocker, Duke's response has always been to post a player in the lane and have him flop, and its worked.
For years Coach K has been able to have his cake and eat it too, by recruiting highly skilled offensive players, and having them play pressure defense they are not athletic enough excel at, because officials consistently bail them out with offensive fouls that are not really fouls but flops. I'm sure no coach in the game would turn down the advantages Duke has, but I like to think few coaches would go as far as completely structuring their defense towards exploiting those kinds of calls.
Long story short, I don't have a lot of respect for Coach K's accomplishments. I do, however, have a tremendous amount of respect for his ability to teach basketball. Whether you hate Duke (or really hate Duke) you have to admit that year in and year out their players do an exceptional job of executing the game plan Coach K has for them. As good a teacher of the game as Jamie Dixon is, Coach K is better - in fact, he is the best – and he has a week to teach his players how to best attack Syracuse.
All coaches at the college level have game plans that will work in theory. Team's lose for two reasons. Either the coach cannot teach the players what he wants them to do effectively, or the players are not able to physically execute the game plan.
There are two things I know about Duke. One, Coach K will do a great job teaching his players how to execute against Syracuse. Two, Duke's players have the skill and talent necessary to execute his game plan.
This leads me to one inescapable conclusion. Duke is almost definitely going to score a bunch of points on Syracuse. They are built perfectly for it. They are arguably the best shooting team in the country. They will have four or five shooters on the court at all times. They will spread us out. All their players are skilled enough to handle the ball, or pass, and basically make the proper play in the space they will be given (space SU will have to give them if Syracuse plans on covering all Duke's shooters).
Syracuse is going to have to score efficiently and go relatively drought free on offense, like they needed to (and did) against Pittsburgh, if they want to win. If the game is a blow out, I'm afraid Duke will be the winning team, and the cause will be poor shooting and a long offensive drought by Syracuse.
The really interesting match up in this game is Syracuse's offense against Duke's defense. This is an especially interesting year for Duke's defense in general, because fewer charges are being called. Who would have thought that boring basketball games (and low ratings) would derail Duke? For me its great to see Coach K finally pay the tab for recruiting a bunch of shooters who are not suited to play defense. I believe this is by far the most talented Duke team in decades, yet they have four losses (including two bad ones to Clemson and Notre Dame) because early in the year, they didn't play any defense at all.
But everything changed for Duke four games ago. In that four game winning streak, no team came within 15 points (their average margin of victory is 23) and nobody scored more than 65 points (their average number of points allowed is 56).
So it seems like Duke has cured their defensive woes, but after taking a close look, I am not so sure that is the case.
Pitt shot 41% from the field which is not great, but they shot 41% from three, and got to the free throw line 24 times, which makes for a good overall offensive performance. Duke won, not because of their defense, but because their offense went absolutely crazy hitting 52% from three even though they shot 25 of them.
Florida State shot 50% from the field against Duke but still managed to lose by 20 mostly because Duke shot an INSANE 43 free throws (home cooking?).
NC State lost to duke by a whopping 35 points but shot 48% from the field which is way above their season average. Again, Duke's offense went crazy, shooting 50% from the field and 46% from three.
Miami is the only team out of the four to put up poor offensive numbers, but Miami has yet to put up good offensive numbers at any point this season (including games against mid majors, several of which they lost) so I'm not sure how much credit you can give to Duke's defense.
From a superficial perspective Duke's defense looks to have improved, and it has improved from the abomination it was early in the year, but its still not very good. Their winning streak has mostly been the product of unbelievably good, record-breaking offense.
As an interesting side note, Syracuse has played unbelievably good, record-breaking defense. So what happens when an unbelievably good, record-breaking offense plays an unbelievably good, record-breaking defense? If you can figure out the answer to that question you can make a lot of money this weekend, because you will know how both the SU/Duke game and the Super Bowl play out. I see a lot of similarities between the two games.
Back to my original point, Duke still does not play very good defense. Their guards (and their forwards) are going to pressure the ball (and not get many turnovers out of it thanks to Tyler Ennis) and they can be beat to the basket where flopping does not get called like it once did and Duke has no shot blocker. I expect Ennis, Fair, and Grant to take the ball to the hole with regularity, and I expect them to draw a lot of fouls and generally have success.
Keys to the Game:
Duke's three point shooting. Its safe to say they are going to take a lot of threes and make a lot of threes, but we need to hope they only make thirty to forty percent. When you shoot close to (or over) fifty percent from three, like Duke did against Pitt, you aren't going to lose often.
Syracuse's Free Throw Shooting. Syracuse fans have been worrying about losing games at the free throw line ever since it cost us a title in '87. The funny thing is, we have lost maybe 1 or 2 games that way in the 28 years since. The best free throw shooting teams never turn out to be the best teams, and I happen to think free throw shooting causes way too much needless worry for fans. But in this game it might be very important. I am assuming that Duke scores a lot, and I am assuming Syracuse drives the lane a lot and as a result gets fouled a lot. If those two assumptions are true, Syracuse can't afford lost possessions due to missed free throws. They need to keep hitting from the line, and keep scoring, if they are going to win. Jerami Grant is especially likely to get to the line, so I see his free throw shooting as especially important.
Rebounding. Syracuse is probably going to have to win the rebounding battle to win the game. They can't afford to give Duke many second chance points, and Duke can be prone to giving up offensive boards which is something Syracuse is exceptionally good at exploiting.
Predictions:
It will take 70 points to win this game. This is a bold prediction considering nobody since Nova has even gotten into the 60's against us, and only Cal and Fordham early in the year got above 70.
Cooney spreads the defense, but doesn't get a lot of shots. Syracuse's offense will be focused on scoring around the basket.
Christmas scores in double figures.
