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Player Marvin Bagley III

My last memory of him will be when he jumped out of Newman’s way to allow for an easy lay up to cover somebody in the corner 3 spot.
 
We should do the best minutes distributions before anything is official with departures:

PG Jones (20) / Duval (20)
SG Reddish (28) / Trent (12)
SF Barrett (28) / Trent (12)
PF Bagley (20) / Williamson (20)
C Carter (28) / Montgomery (12)

DNP - DeLaurier (captain), Bolden (captain), O’Connell, White, Vrankovic (pays tuition)

40-0. Too much talent not to be undefeated.
 
K would still lose 5 games with that roster.

Are we better next year?

Jones 6'2 fr
Cam 6'8 fr
Barrett 6'7 fr
Zion 6'7 fr
Bolden 6'11 jr
Bench
Goldwire 6'1 so
AOC 6'5 so
DeLaurier 6'10 so
Montgomery 6'10 fr?????

Jones>Duval
Reddish>Allen
Barrett>Trent
Zion<Bagley
Bolden<Carter

Jones and Barrett are probably average outside shooters, Zion is probably mediocre and Cam probably elite. AOC should have a breakout year and he's an above average shooter. Goldwire looks to be a decent shooter but will he even play? No senior leader, lose a lot of size and post scoring. Will be interesting to see what happens.

Once again the season will depend on if we can PT together a solid m2m defense. The zone was way better than I expected but I'll never fully trust a zone. At least not as your only defense.
 
I completely agree. We have to become better at m2m. Calipari does it every year with teams just as young as ours. Find a way to do it.
 
A lot of people have touched on it. I think we will be better because the offense will be much more similar to what a good offense looks like. There will be basic PnR action where if the defender goes under the screen, we have multiple guys who will be comfortable rising up and hitting the open 3, and if the defender goes over the screen, we have multiple guys who will be comfortable blowing by and breaking down the defense, and either finishing or kicking. If the defense switches on screens, we have multiple guys who can take advantage of matchups. This is the most fundamental and common offense used by good teams at the highest level. Every Finals game over the past few years has been, at the simplest level, nothing but a series of picks until the offense has the matchup they want, and then it’s the best offensive players making decisions with shooters all around them.

Duke had maybe two players who could run PnR or even drive effectively out of iso this season (Allen and Trent), but they had to deal with terrible spacing, as Bagley and Carter’s best value was to be near the basket. Duval was left open from 3 by all good coaches. Setting a pick for him would accomplish nothing; the defender would go way under and you’re left with a 27% 3pt shot or worse, since it’s off the dribble, which is a drag on Duke’s efficiency. Bagley may develop into the kind of player who can run PnR from the perimeter, but he’s years away at this point. Carter no. DeLaurier can’t dribble yet. O’Connell wasn’t trusted to be on the court.

Next year, Jones, Reddish, Barrett and even Williamson should be competent at this, and there shouldn’t be more than one guy clogging the paint. The coaches did what they had to do to have their best players on the court this year. Their best players should be able to run a normal offense next year.

On defense, just figure something out. You have 3 of the best, longest athletes in college basketball, along with a point guard who is known for good defense and a veteran center who is also long and athletic. If you really can’t figure out a good defense with these players, stop recruiting OADs. They won’t be any better than this.
 
I'm just hoping we can throw out a top 25 m2m. I can't stand a zone defense. Have always hated it. I think it hurt our offense and defensive rebounding quite a bit, maybe the stats will prove me wrong. But it's such a let down to see a team run a zone and basically saying "we can't guard you".
 
CMon, I actually agree with you about zone in general. It basically says you can’t play man to man, which isn’t great, since man to man has a higher ceiling. That’s where we are with the program, though. That’s what everyone had been saying about Duke for years. Duke can’t play man to man anymore, for whatever reasons. It is what it is. We almost lost to Vermont at home because of it. We lost to Lehigh and Mercer because of it. They have to make something else work.
 
I would be willing to accept a hit in offensive efficiency down to like 20-25 in exchange for a top 10-15 M2M KP defense. I really think it comes down to what we emphasize in practice. Every year Duke comes out so crisp offensively that it's clear Duke spends more time emphasizing offense than defense. Every year, Duke is sharp out of the gates offensively. I would rather reverse it. There is so much talent it's probably impossible to not have a top 20 offense even if you put a significantly greater emphasize on defense.

I hate to always reference Calipari and UK, but UK does this often. They start like shit on offense, turnovers, stagnant offensively but the defense is there, and as the season progresses the offense just naturally gets better due to more experience and more time to work on it. Kentucky usually plays well in the NCAA Tournament. That team this year just had no offensive talent, but we have so offensive talent/skill it won't matter too much early in the season. Calipari beats them into a good/great defensive team and then he tries to fix the offense.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
CMon, I actually agree with you about zone in general. It basically says you can’t play man to man, which isn’t great, since man to man has a higher ceiling. That’s where we are with the program, though. That’s what everyone had been saying about Duke for years. Duke can’t play man to man anymore, for whatever reasons. It is what it is. We almost lost to Vermont at home because of it. We lost to Lehigh and Mercer because of it. They have to make something else work.
Click to expand...
Not blaming Scheyer at all but if he goes to Pitt maybe K can bring in a defensive coach. Not every coach has to be an ex player. Cal has guys on his sidelines that he didn't coach. I don't really know who we'd look at but it's an option.
 
The only person in the Duke family who is going to improve the defense is Johnny Dawkins and he's not coming back. The defense at Duke was great while Dawkins was here. When he left it slowly but surely dissolved into garbage defense. At UCF Dawkins has had the #8 and #18 defense the last two seasons.
 
I think the m2m will be a little better next season simply because Duke can conceivably switch most screens. If you have a lineup of Jones, Reddish, Barrett, Zion, and DeLaurier, the frontcourt guys should be able to guard most college guards well enough, and Jones is really the only one who can’t switch onto a big. Switching would help alleviate some of the rotation/help-and-recover problems.
 
Even if we were good at m2m, I don't think it would've been good against either Kansas or Villanova. Zone was the only way to go this season against teams like that, we would've been just been shredded bad with Bagley and Carter on the floor at the same time by those teams. Zone was the really only option for this team to have a chance at beating guard dominant top teams like Nova and Kansas.
 
I think any time we get carved up the way we did, we're going to express some dissatisfaction with the defense, but our main problem yesterday was a combination of missed shots coupled with a lack of rebounding. Missing 22 3's while giving up 47 rebounds is not a great formula for winning.
 
The data set is large enough in my mind to conclude that M2M is a waste of time. In fact, if you care enough about seeding, it’s probably the case that M2M disqualifies Duke from a 1-seed because we’re going to take too many losses in the first half of the year because of it.

You can delude yourself into thinking that next year’s OAD crop is somehow different, but it’s almost certainly not. Since 2014, which I view as a line in the sand, both because it was the year we started relying more heavily on youth and because it was the first year of rule changes which largely eliminated hand checking, we have something like 140 games of data to back up the fact that the M2M under K is ineffective. I would wager that if you did a 5 year Kenpom average of all of those M2M games, you’re landing somewhere between 60-80 nationally.

Hanging your hat on 5 great games in March/April 2015 seems silly at this point. You certainly wouldn’t have statistics on your side. I’m not even sure any of those offenses that we faced in the NCAAT were ball screen heavy enough to do what Larranaga did to Duke that year. Plus that 2015 rotation was significantly more experienced than what Duke will be throwing out next year.

I’m in the camp of Play Zone Until K Retires, then reevaluate.

The hope for next year is to basically repeat this year- be Kenpom top 3 but with better decison making to swing close games.
 
ZackM said:
Unfortunately, the zone that made us a top 10 defense was not the zone we used in the Elite 8.
Click to expand...

That's true, and frustrating.

At the same time, our extended 2-3 did not look as good against Carolina as it did against teams with fewer perimeter options. Kansas and Villanova have enough in common with UNC personnel-wise, and both shoot over 40% from three as a team at high volume, that I'm not sure it more 2-3 would have been a panacea. That 1-3-1 sure was fucking awful though.
 
childress22 said:
ZackM said:
Unfortunately, the zone that made us a top 10 defense was not the zone we used in the Elite 8.
Click to expand...

That's true, and frustrating.

At the same time, our extended 2-3 did not look as good against Carolina as it did against teams with fewer perimeter options. Kansas and Villanova have enough in common with UNC personnel-wise, and both shoot over 40% from three as a team at high volume, that I'm not sure it more 2-3 would have been a panacea. That 1-3-1 sure was fucking awful though.
Click to expand...

Yeah but we ran it in the first half and Kansas had 33 points on poor shooting and 10 turnovers. Had we just replicated that in the 2nd half we likely don't get out to the atrocious 2nd half and we win the game. The decision to go 1-3-1 lost us the game. There were other mistakes, but that was the biggest one.
 
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