Duke Basketball 2014-2015 Discussion thread

[Thain]

Was with the wife a Garth Brooks concert so couldn't watch the game. How did the team look? better on offense compared to last night? Unselfish play? Good defense?

 

[aiw]

Missed a lot of shots and FTs. Assist rate 73%. Defense was great. Efficiency numbers on both sides very good.

 

[aiw]

Oh, and Winslow is a freak.

 

[DurhamSon]

Watching Justise play leaves you feeling flushed and needing to light up a cigarette.

 

[Slap the Floor]

Tonight's defensive performance was a pleasant surprise. Great effort on the boards and in team defense. They have to keep getting better. The offense isn't going to be producing at a high rate every single night and I think this tournament showed that. The one thing that should always be there though is great defense, and this weekend it was so I'm pleased with the improvement over last season thus far.

Wisconsin is looming. I'm excited for the test.

 

[Karl Beem]

Also, so what's happened with our bench? Are we just going back to 5 guys?

The only surprise is MP3 getting so few minutes after his great game vs Temple. No way Semi puts Winslow on the bench. Grayson is the sixth wing, he won't play much until someone gets hurt.

 

[Dattier]

If we were squeaking by while playing less than our best I'd be worried we were setting ourselves up for the same thing the football team has gone through the last couple weeks, but the worst thing that we saw in NY was Stanford's briefly cutting our lead to single digits, so I'm inclined to see this as evidence that we have multiple ways to win.

 

[DrKlahn]

Some encouraging signs that we won't lose to a 14 seed this year:

1. Last night was the third time in five games that an opponent's eFG was under 40%. Total number of times that happened last season: 3.
2. Our worst opponent free throw rate of the season (32.1%) would have been the 10th best game last year in terms of free throw prevention. The rest of the games would have been in the top 6.

 

[aiw]

Duke is the only team until kenpom #143 Morehead State to have played 5 games.

 

[aiw]

Only 6 teams,total, have played 5 games

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

Yep. Wisconsin soon.

 

[DrKlahn]

He has a point about the 3-point shooting. Normalized shooting would probably be worth up to 7 points a game (maybe less b/c of offensive rebounding). So the defense would look solid (~.95 PPP) instead of great (.85 PPP).

But.....Duke is doing its usual job of limiting threes (14 attempts a game), so I think he's probably just fishing for a point here. Normalized shooting would equate to making 2-3 more shots a game. Not to mention that Duke hasn't been especially lucky against 2 point jumpers (44% according to that clearly correct hoop-math site) and that's the most frequently taken shot against them.

 

[DurhamSon]

Actual: 9/72 against (12.5%)

So if we allow 25% on the season, that number becomes 18 made. Being conservative and assuming that on NONE of those misses did the other team grab an offensive rebound and score, which is almost certainly not true, that's an extra 1.8 threes scored per game on possessions, adding 5.4 points against to the average of 67.8 possessions we are playing a game. So our Defense goes from 0.84 to 0.92.

And considering that teams almost certainly score at least once or twice off offensive boards, that number is probably exaggerated.

We should be getting credit for chasing guys off the line though.

 

[DurhamSon]

Looking back on Kenpom, in our good defensive years we've allowed teams to shoot 28-29% against us from three on the year.

So add an extra 2.5 made threes over that span. That comes out to 2.3 more threes made per game to be expected, so defense goes from 0.84 to 0.94.



That still would have been good for top 15 in the country last year..

Take into account scoring off those offensive boards... and the regression to the mean on long two point jumpers, and we're sitting at... 0.91, 0.92?


That headline is total fucking click-bait though.

 

[DurhamSon]

Looking back to 2010, our 2p FG% was allowing 44%, which was elite. This year 48%, which is middle of the pack.

Anyone want to look up the CBS numbers for two point jumpers made against us? I feel like that 48% number is not being inflated because of layups, unlike last year.

 

[rome8180]

Yeah, I was just about to gripe last night about how many midrange shots have been made against us. That's got to be nearly as unusual as our three-point-percentage defense.

 

[aiw]

Marshall Plumlee is 4-4 from the line
Rasheed Sulaimon is 4-8 from the line

 

[SeanMayTriedToEatMe]

Welp, UNC will be ranked higher than Duke, and therefore considered to be a better team than Duke, after the Wisconsin game. UNC at Kentucky isn't until December 13.

 

[StopThePumpFakesShav]

UNC is playing in a loaded Battle 4 Atlantis though later this week. If they make the finals, Wisconsin will likely be waiting for them.

 

[DrKlahn]

They will have beaten Wisconsin and Kentucky by mid-December. It's kind of hard to argue that they are not the best team.