Jon Scheyer walked into the news conference room in Las Vegas after the Duke Blue Devils’ second loss of the season with a surprisingly positive outlook.
For the second time in 15 days, the Blue Devils had let a winnable game against a top-tier team slip through their fingertips. First the 10-point lead that evaporated late against the Kentucky Wildcats, then key empty possessions late to foil a comeback bid against the Kansas Jayhawks. From outside, that made Duke a relative disappointment, but you wouldn’t have known it from Scheyer’s tone that night.
“We’re asking a lot of our 17, 18 and 19-year-olds. We are. That’s what they want,” Scheyer said that night. “As much as I badly want to win, at some point I thought I was crazy for the schedule we had our first six games, but I did it with this group because I felt they could take it … the growth that we’re going to have from this whole trip … we’re going to grow so much.”
Duke hasn’t lost since. And with how the Blue Devils are playing and how weak their schedule in the ACC is, it might be a bit before Scheyer has to face the media after a loss again.
In all, it’s 10 straight victories for Duke since the Kansas game, including a win over the now-No. 1 Auburn Tigers and a 6–0 start to ACC play. The Blue Devils have led by 18-plus points at some point in each of their last five ACC games, including a 27-point drubbing of the SMU Mustangs with Scheyer home sick and a 29-point win against a potential NCAA tournament team in the Pittsburgh Panthers. It has been over a month since Duke’s in-game win probability dropped below 75%, dating back to the second half of an eventual double-digit win over the Louisville Cardinals on Dec. 8. To summarize: Duke isn’t just winning, it’s dominating the competition right now.
The heartbeat of that surge has been freshman sensation Cooper Flagg, who has gone from star to potential national player of the year in the last month. Flagg, who turned 18 in late December, is fresh off one of the most impressive statistical performances of the season against the Notre Dame Fighting Irish with 42 points, six rebounds and seven assists on just 14 total shot attempts. In five games since his 18th birthday, he’s averaging over 24 points per game and shooting a ridiculous 63% from the field, buoyed by improvement from beyond the arc after struggling some from distance early in his Duke career. At a time in the calendar when many top freshmen hit the proverbial “freshman wall,” Flagg has taken his game to new heights and might still have more room to grow.
But other, more subtle tweaks have catalyzed Duke’s surge as much as Flagg’s ascent. Beginning with the game against Auburn, Scheyer swapped out sophomore Caleb Foster in the starting lineup for Tulane Green Wave transfer Sion James. While not as gifted an on-ball creator as Foster, James is an elite role player and a perfect fit in Duke’s lineup. He’s an outstanding on-ball defender and gives Duke incredible positional size across the board with no player shorter than 6' 6" in the starting lineup. He’s also a willing passer, with 21 assists to just seven turnovers in ACC play, and doesn’t need the ball in his hands to be successful. He may be averaging under eight points per game, but his impact on Duke is immense: Against top-100 opponents this season, Duke is 22.9 points per 100 possessions better with James on the floor than off, per Hoop-Explorer.
The Blue Devils have been helped, of course, by the relative weakness of the ACC, which rates as the worst of the five high-major conferences, per KenPom, and is closer to the Mountain West in those rankings than it is to the next-worst high-major league, the Big East. Duke is the league’s only team in the top 25 of either the AP Top 25 or the NET, and the ACC currently has eight of its 18 teams ranked outside the top 100 of the NET. The other four high-major leagues combined have just five teams ranked 100-plus. That Duke already has road wins against two of the league’s top six and a home victory over a third from that top group and barely has broken a sweat in the process is a pretty good illustration of how far above the rest of the league the Blue Devils currently are.
That’s why it’s not unreasonable to start talking about the possibility of the Blue Devils going undefeated in ACC play. KenPom gives Duke a remarkably high 31.7% chance of pulling off the feat and at least an 87% chance of winning in 12 of its 14 ACC games. The highest likelihood of a slip-up comes in road trips at the Clemson Tigers on Feb. 8 and the North Carolina Tar Heels on March 8, but if played today the Blue Devils would still be considerable favorites to win each game. A team hasn’t gone undefeated in league play in a high-major conference since Kentucky in 2015, which famously started the season 38–0 before its shocking stumble against the Wisconsin Badgers in the Final Four.
The team with the best chance of beating Duke before at least late March? Likely the Illinois Fighting Illini, whom the Blue Devils will face at Madison Square Garden in a rare February nonconference matchup. But while it’s perhaps unfair to start discussing perfect seasons and 20-plus-game winning streaks given Duke’s relative inexperience, its dominance of late and largely manageable schedule make it at least a story line worth monitoring as teams head into the meat of conference play.
As he said in November, Scheyer put his team through an early gauntlet, one that exposed its weaknesses while other teams were beating up on buy-game opponents. The result? A Duke team that despite its youth is firing on all cylinders … and might still have another gear to hit over the next 2½ months.
Other Notes
- It might be hard to unseat Scheyer for ACC Coach of the Year if the Blue Devils push for an unbeaten mark in the league, but Pat Kelsey deserves enormous credit for what he has accomplished in his first season at Louisville. The Cardinals lost two projected starters in Kasean Pryor and Koren Johnson early this season and still sit 5–1 in ACC play, very much in the thick of things for an NCAA tournament berth. Louisville has won six straight and is favored per KenPom in 13 of its final 14 games.
- For as good as Kentucky has been this season under Mark Pope, it’s at least worth monitoring the Wildcats’ recent defensive woes. Since Kentucky’s Dec. 7 game against Gonzaga, the Wildcats have been the nation’s No. 183 defense, per T-Rank. Even in big wins like their recent ones against the Florida Gators and Mississippi State Rebels, the Cats have given up 100 and 90 points, respectively. While Kentucky’s personnel doesn’t lend itself to being elite on the defensive end, Pope has to find a way to get his team to stop getting torched on that end if it wants to advance deep in the NCAA tournament.
- St. Thomas is in just its fourth year as a Division I program, transitioning up from Division III in 2021–22, yet already looks like a powerhouse mid-major squad. The Tommies are 14–5, a perfect 4–0 in Summit League play, and just dropped a remarkable 119 points in regulation against the South Dakota Coyotes on Saturday. Longtime head coach Johnny Tauer is one of the brightest offensive minds in the sport, at any level. Because of the NCAA’s arcane four-year transition period for teams moving up to Division I, the Tommies are still ineligible to play in the NCAA tournament. It’s long since time to take another look at that rule and make it possible for programs like St. Thomas to go dancing like everyone else.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Duke Swung From Disappointing Start to Unbeaten Streak With No End in Sight.