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[2017-18] Pitt / at Wake / Virginia / Notre Dame / at St. John's

rome8180 said:
I am feeling cautiously optimistic on this team as a whole right now. Even in our terrible stretch, I said it felt different than '12, '14, or even last year.

Granted, the back half of the schedule is pretty brutal.
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I think a lot of it, at least for me, has to do with the apparent team chemistry this group has. Our past disappointing teams didn't seem to like each other very much and didn't seem to give a shit if they won or lost. Find some video of last year's team when they show the bench, they looked like they were at a funeral.

We seem to be heading in the right direction at the right time. Amber Alert for Grayson Allen has been cancelled, defense looks functional, everyone, aside from Duval (Missing - Presumed Dead) and the shitheads, have visibly improved.
 
rome8180 said:
They will. Won't matter. UVA can't score enough to beat us in Cameron.
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And considering the fact that the home schedule has been so lame so far, one would hope we'll see a pretty intense Cameron.
 
I'll admit I was wrong. Thought K would be too stubborn to make defensive adjustments. He did it over night and the last 5 games look like a different team.
 
CMon85 said:
I'll admit I was wrong. Thought K would be too stubborn to make defensive adjustments. He did it over night and the last 5 games look like a different team.
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For better or worse, I ride with K. He is my battle captain. He brought us 5 ships and built us into the preeminent brand in collegiate athletics.

Am pleased and in no way shocked with our progress.
 
I too was wrong in believing this senile old fart would never try anything different to improve his defense.

It took six seasons for K to get sick of watching his defense executed terribly, but here we are, and if Duke continues to play defense at the #2 level in the country like it has over the past five games (only behind Virginia), then this team should be one of the biggest favorites ever to win the title.

At 126 adj oeff (the level Duke's offense has been at all season) and 85 adj deff (roughly the level Duke's defense has been at over the past five games), Duke's efficiency margin would be 41. Highest in Kenpom history was 2015 Kentucky's 37. The gap between Duke and Villanova would be equal to the gap between the 10th best team (Kansas) and the 47th best team (Boise State).
 
Actually the defense has been closer to 89-90 adj eff than 85 over the past five. So only the 5th or 6th best defense in the country.
 
I love the adjustments, and it's honestly fun watching our defense for the first time since the last two months of 2015.

In addition to staff, some props are due to Wendell. He's now in a position to succeed much more on D, but he the degree of his success in part due to his own timing and savvy. He's turned into a great help defender.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
I too was wrong in believing this senile old fart would never try anything different to improve his defense.

It took six seasons for K to get sick of watching his defense executed terribly, but here we are, and if Duke continues to play defense at the #2 level in the country like it has over the past five games (only behind Virginia), then this team should be one of the biggest favorites ever to win the title.

At 126 adj oeff (the level Duke's offense has been at all season) and 85 adj deff (roughly the level Duke's defense has been at over the past five games), Duke's efficiency margin would be 41. Highest in Kenpom history was 2015 Kentucky's 37. The gap between Duke and Villanova would be equal to the gap between the 10th best team (Kansas) and the 47th best team (Boise State).
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Oh my.
 
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
Actually the defense has been closer to 89-90 adj eff than 85 over the past five. So only the 5th or 6th best defense in the country.
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We'll take it! As good as our offense is as well as our rebounding, I don't think we need to have a top 10 D to win it. I think we'd be ok with a top 20-25 defense. But I agree with you, if we continue at a top 10 level then we have to be massive favorites.
 
At Pitt, we used reckless unsustainable overplay. The defense looked better but not in a way I could believe in.
 
Yeah I mean I'm all for being hopeful and I get that everything's adjusted to the opponent, but I'm gonna need to see us play good defense against a variety of better offenses before I get too excited about the improvement.

We've only played three different teams in this stretch, one of which is a complete dumpster fire that had actually lost it's best player before we played them (Pitt), and as a result are probably much worse than even Kenpom is saying. They're the type of team that's not going to be able to handle Old K style defense. I mean they're far worse than Evansville and we smothered Evansville a couple of weeks before the NCSU debacle.

I thought we did a nice job in both Wake games (except defensive rebounding in game 2) and that we played well on defense consistently throughout those games excepting garbage time. Not a highly ranked offense anymore, but that's an offense we've struggled guarding in the past (they put up 83 and 94 against us last year). Those two games taken together have given me the most reason for optimism.

Miami was a bit more troubling because we'd given up 66 points to them, a lot of which was on easy baskets, through the first 32 minutes or so. Our zone was incredibly effective in the last 8 minutes and we shut them down extremely well in that stretch, which made the overall game result look above average despite not looking so good for most of the game. If that's going to be a silver bullet against certain kinds of teams, then great. But there was a lot of bad before that.
 
Well, against Miami our halfcourt defense was very good throughout the game (whether in man or zone). We were turning the ball over a lot, and even when we were not turning it over they were pushing the ball a lot. That seemed to be a deliberate, and probably unexpected, strategy on Larranaga's part. Not turning it over and getting back in transition seem more correctible. And to my eye, it doesn't seem like the transition defense has been a huge problem otherwise this year. I was more worried about ball screen defense and the halfcourt in general. Even while we were struggling with Miami, we appeared to have fixed those.
 
That's right. I forgot about the turnovers, so would pull back a bit from my Miami comments. I guess I'm still a bit skeptical about the transition d given how bad it's been in previous recent years.

Somewhere there was a 1-351 ranking (maybe teamrankings or scacc) of transition d that I remember looking at in past years that I can't seem to find.
 
You can sort by all sorts of transition defense metrics here: https://hoop-math.com/leader_td2018.php

Duke is #81 in preventing initial attempts in transition and #226 in eFG% allowed in transition. They would rather crash the boards to boost the offense. I don't disagree.

A very slow team that doesn't like to create transition opportunities will generally perform worse against Duke.
 
Historically we've handled the pack
SeanMayTriedToEatMe said:
You can sort by all sorts of transition defense metrics here: https://hoop-math.com/leader_td2018.php

Duke is #81 in preventing initial attempts in transition and #226 in eFG% allowed in transition. They would rather crash the boards to boost the offense. I don't disagree.

A very slow team that doesn't like to create transition opportunities will generally perform worse against Duke.
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You mean, like Virginia?
 
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