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[2018-19] Virginia, at Pittsburgh, Georgia Tech, at Notre Dame, St. John's

The GT game won’t be remembered, but it could end up being important. K went small the entire last 12-16 minutes. No Bolden, no Javin, no White. Ran them off the court. AOC was not terrible. That’s all he needs to be to allow K to lift the ceiling of this team a bit higher.
 
I've started watching about half of the games. Turn on about halfway through the first half, turn off with 8-12 minutes left. Anyone else doing something like this?

It's just hard to care very much. You know nothing interesting is going to happen schematically or anything, and that our extreme talent advantage in every game will probably eventually offset the coaching disadvantage we face in every game, despite not being used properly.

There's no identity to the team, no coherent strategy, no single thing it does particularly well other than having a Zion, this unfair, misused, freak asset who gives the team enough anomaly plays on both ends, enough individual efforts that have nothing to do with anything else the coaches or players are doing, to elevate the team into top 2-3 status.

Barrett and Reddish just play bad basketball, for the most part, and get away with it to varying degrees due solely to genetics. Even when Barrett plays well, it's just bulling his way towards the rim, barely avoiding a pushoff call, jumping into an overmatched defender, and hanging until he gets a shot off on the way down. Such an inefficient, poorly-coached use of his talent, even ignoring usage issues.

We have two upperclass, 5-star bigs who should be NBA prospects, but Javin's mental state has devolved into a somewhere between a mental patient and a puppy, and Bolden... while he seems okay most of the time due to elevating his skill level and IQ to a ~5th grade level while still being 8'6 380, his lapses still probably outweigh his value adds overall.

We're watching a team that should have finally been the 1999 sequal - and started off at that level - stagnate as better-coached teams catch up to it over the course of the season, to the point where it's just yet another ACC contender, despite a historic talent edge on the rest of the field combined. So gross.

And for the record, I fully expect the team to get out of the annual January slump, and look like a solid favorite again come March, as garbage coaching can only hold picks 1, 2, 4, and 20 below that threshold for so long. But in the meantime, who really gives a shit about whether they underachieve by like 20% vs. 40% vs obviously overmatched opponents due to their coach's senile negligence? These games should all be over by halftime. It's embarrassing watching these guys be led to think today was something like a gutty achievement, and a reasonable level of performance for who they are, before they go off to the NBA and realize how easy it is for them to absolutely destroy competition like this after like 3 months under a genius like Tyrone Lue or Mark Jackson.
 
I think that’s a bit negative, Pants. Yeah they looked like ass today and offense against a zone is a major issue but even very good/great teams sleepwalk against shit opponents sometimes.

In 2015, for example, Duke came off the big comeback win at Virginia with a similarly shitty performance against #86 Georgia Tech. They won 72-66- kind of sleptwalk through it.

Lot of shit to solve for these guys and while I was annoyed in the moment, not taking too much away from this one.

Also on the coaching, definitely some complaints on usage allocation this year but Reddish just isn’t making shots, and that’s not really on the staff. 2017 was a disaster from
a coaching perspective. I haven’t had as many complaints with the coaching since the Feb 2018 shift to zone though. The UVA game, for example, I thought was very well coached.
 
2015 had a bunch of sleep walk performances. @VT, @FSU, GT, etc. They choked the @ND game away. The NC State and Miami losses were horrible and much, much worse than the Gonzaga or Syracuse loss we have had this season due to the the helpless feeling we had as it felt like 2014 all over again with that garbage defense allowing lay-up after lay-up.

I really don't think there is anything wrong with this team schematically or with game to game coaching. The team can't shoot well overall, it's a huge issue. I'm enjoying this team- having Zion is fun, but at the same point in the 2015 season I'm enjoying this team much more as I don't feel like there is anything fundamentally wrong with the team. In 2015 the defense was really bad. Zone helped but the man to man was bad until very late in the season.

This team plays very good defense which is just fun considering how starved Duke fans were for a man to man defense that was good for an entire season and not allowing lay-up lines. The offense is good but it currently has a limitation because we can't shoot from 3 worth a shit, but with that said, in the last 5 games we have faced the #33, #15, #1, #24 and #12 defenses. We played one of those games without Zion for like 25 minutes, and we played 3 of those games without our point guard.

stylistically i'm not sure what else anyone would want Duke to look like. We get out heavy in transition, we are an elite offensive rebounding team, and the team as a whole gets shots in the paint/around the rim frequently, and we have elite talent so having a free flowing offense allowing the top 2 picks to read the floor and make decisions is fine.
 
They're insanely fun to watch when they use half of their potential, and aneurysm inducingly terrible to watch when they don't.
 
Even if we aren't a good 3 PT shooting team, we aren't this bad, because nobody is this bad. We're going to heat up at some point and regress to mean a little bit.
 
We've had 1 good 3 point shooting game in a month and a half. Not gonna get better.
 
I think you're severely underselling our defense, Pants. Sure, this team can't shoot and K isn't running good offense. But we do have an identity. And it's on that end. We've been good to absolutely dominant there all year with two understandable blips (early in the year vs. Gonzaga and the Syracuse game).

As for the offense, it's really hard to run anything creative when no one can even hit a wide open jumper.
 
The team can’t shoot and isn’t going to magically improve outside of some random hot shooting nights.

Offensive improvement is simple. Get the ball to Zion in the lane as much as possible. Even against zone and packlines, force it to him. Seems like Roy has had plenty of good offenses with shitty shooting by scoring in transition, securing ORebs, and limiting turnovers.
 
rome8180 said:
I think you're severely underselling our defense, Pants. Sure, this team can't shoot and K isn't running good offense. But we do have an identity. And it's on that end. We've been good to absolutely dominant there all year with two understandable blips (early in the year vs. Gonzaga and the Syracuse game).

As for the offense, it's really hard to run anything creative when no one can even hit a wide open jumper.
Click to expand...

We've only got one kid who I feel can reliably hit a layup or dunk.
 
I've never seen so many kicked balls in a game as there were today. Had to be at least 5 by GT. I remember one by Duke.
 
Notre Dame keeps the tempo extremely slow. #292 adjusted tempo.

Notre Dame is one the best teams in the country at limiting turnovers. #3 turnover rate, #21 steal rate.

Notre Dame is very good at defending 2s but can be exposed by a good 3pt shooting team. However, Juwan Durham drives much of their rim protection with an outlandish 22% block rate, and he is currently injured.

Any team that relies on transition scoring and inside scoring while struggling in halfcourt offense, especially from 3, would likely do worse against Notre Dame than the overall numbers would indicate.
 
If, like me, you view the Syracuse loss as nothing more than the convergence of multiple perfect storms and therefore do not consider the result to be reflective of anything meaningful, then Duke is beyond ripe for a bummer of a loss, and this ND game seems like a perfect place for it.
 
They do limit turnovers and can hit open shots, but having seen them play a few times, I don’t think their guards will be able to cause Duke problems with penetration - even with Bolden guarding them.
 
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