Well, that probably didn’t go the way anyone at Cameron Indoor Stadium hoped.
Yes, when the final buzzer sounded, it all added up to a 72-46 victory for the Duke Blue Devils, but it’s hard for a national championship contender to walk away from a grueling midweek battle with excessive confidence. The Incarnate Word Cardinals had won just five of their first nine games, and yet through 14 minutes of Tuesday’s game, they sat within two points of the Blue Devils.
Freshman superstar Cooper Flagg only played 22 minutes as the team trudged through its third game in seven days, and the Blue Devils may just need the upcoming rest week desperately. However, a few of the first-half problems against UIW extended a few concerning trend for Cameron Crazies still trying to parse out the postseason ceiling for this year’s team.
Here are our five instant takeaways from Tuesday’s Duke basketball victory.
Okay, NOW it’s time to panic about the slow starts
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The Blue Devils fell behind by double digits in the first 10 minutes against the Kansas Jayhawks, Auburn Tigers, and Louisville Cardinals, but each of those mostly stemmed from the other team catching fire from 3-point range to start the game. It was easy to brush off Duke’s slow starts as the difficulty of half-court offense when your opponent starts five-for-six from distance.
When it takes more than 14 minutes to score 20 points against UIW, a team that entered Tuesday’s game within the bottom 15 in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency, despite the Cardinals barely scoring any points themselves? Alright, now the drawing board needs to get dusted off.
Isaiah Evans proved in the second half exactly why he should have been subbed in earlier
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Isaiah Evans exists for the exact scenario Duke ran into in the opening 20 minutes. The five-star freshman is a flamethrower off the bench, a remorseless shooter who will pull from any distance with any amount of space. He kickstarted the Auburn comeback with six first-half triples, and with the Blue Devils unable to find the net on offense, the team desperately needed those volts of electricity.
Instead, he only played five minutes before the break, and Duke limped back to the locker room with a 28-21 lead. Jon Scheyer let him play 14 of the last 20 minutes, and surprise, he made four of his five 3-point attempts to stack 14 points and energize a 44-25 half. If a similar start happens again in the future, Evans needs to take the court sooner.
Those inside feeds to Khaman Maluach, give me more of them
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With Syracuse transfer Maliq Brown absent on Tuesday with a toe injury, freshman center Khaman Maluach spent 22 minutes on the court. However, his closing minutes of the first half really deserve attention. With Duke unable to generate any momentum from behind the arc, the Blue Devils started letting Maluach enforce his will in the paint, and it worked. He scored 10 points in the final 6:09 of the frame, including multiple trips to the free-throw line, and came down with multiple offensive rebounds in a single possession to help the Blue Devils finally build a breathable lead.
Maluach ended Tuesday’s game with a team-leading 17 points and seven rebounds, and like Evans, he showed off another way the Blue Devils can potentially kick-start their dormant offense. Perhaps the Cameron Crazies will see more of those pick-and-roll feeds and lobs in the opening minutes against George Mason.
It got overshadowed by the offensive panic, but this is probably the best defense in the country
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Brown’s absence could have easily rattled the Blue Devils on this end of the floor as he’s been the most impactful defensive presence to start this season. Instead, Duke absolutely erased an Incarnate Word offense making more than 41% of its 3-pointers to start the season. UIW made just 32.1% of its shots and 21.7% of its triples on Tuesday, and through 10 games, the Blue Devils have held eight teams under 40% from the floor and six teams under 28% from behind the arc.
An average offensive showing from the Cardinals would have put the home team in a potentially insurmountable hole, but the Blue Devils can save themselves around the opposite basket.
The Blue Devils might not be a great 3-point shooting team after all
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This takeaway should be covered in disclaimers about small-sample fallacies. However, over their last four games, the Blue Devils have connected on just 35 of their 113 3-point efforts (31.0%). If you remove the Auburn game from that sample, the numbers drop to 28.6%. Evans has made a staggering 50% of his looks this season, but Tyrese Proctor is the only other member of the rotation above 40% now. It’s four games, but it’s also almost half of the season at this point.
