I would only find the outcome of the Southern game extremely worrisome if I believed that Grayson and Trent would consistently shoot a combined 16% from 3 and that K would never wane from playing overplay man-to-man defense. The MSU game gives me hope that the defensive style is correctable/changeable and with the potential to force more turnovers in the zone, perhaps Duke's offense against Southern would've finished with something closer to 1.18-1.20 PPP versus the 1.13 they had on Friday. Obviously missing a potential 3rd 3-point threat is a big weakness for this team, and I'm skeptical that someone like O'Connell fully fills that void this year, but I think offensive rebounding can mitigate that to some degree.
As for FT shooting, that is going to be a potential major headache all year, but if Allen can increase his usage to his 15/16 and 16/17 levels while also having his FT rate return to the levels of the past two years and Bagley can find a way to just be Marshall Plumlee from the line, Duke can shoot near or just below the national average as a team. It's not great, but I tend to believe that Bagley is closer to the 5/9 Southern performance than the combined 2/9 against Elon and Utah Valley. Also cannot find the stats now, but I'm almost positive it was documented in the Wendell Carer thread that there is reason to believe he could be better than the 66% he's shooting now. I'm also optimistic that Gary Trent will also manage to have a FT rate greater than 7.8 as the season progresses.
Southern is a bad basketball team, there's no way around that. But drawing too many conclusions from this game days after Duke played in the biggest regular season game of the season outside of the Duke/UNC games is probably a wasted exercise. We've been burned in the past but I'm willing to give this young team the benefit of the doubt given that we're through 10% of the season and every possession, every missed FT, etc has more weight in the data we see.