The Duke Blue Devils got revenge on multiple fronts in Arizona on Friday night.
After last week’s 77-72 loss to the Kentucky Wildcats, freshman phenom Cooper Flagg and his teammates needed to answer questions against the best of the best on their schedule. They got their chance with a road game against No. 17 Arizona, a team that beat the Blue Devils in Cameron Indoor Stadium just last season.
The biggest narrative surrounding Friday’s game, however, centered around Arizona’s star player. Caleb Love, a former North Carolina Tar Heels star, had already played Duke eight times over the previous four seasons. He won five times, including the infamous Final Four victory in 2022 that ended Coach K’s tenure in Durham.
Flagg made sure all of those trends reversed in Tucson, scoring 24 points to lead Duke to a 69-55 victory over the Wildcats. Here are our five biggest takeaways from Duke’s first ranked victory of the 2024-25 men’s basketball season.
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The idea of fading an overwhelming favorite will always exist, and Kon Knueppel made contrarian takes look smart after he won ACC Rookie of the Week honors in the opening week, but surprise! The best player on the team is also the best offensive force. Flagg finished with 24 points on Friday, making 10 of his 22 shots and converting two of his five 3-point looks.
Between the Kentucky and Arizona games, Flagg averaged 25.0 points. No other player on the roster averaged more than 13.5, and Flagg’s 41 attempts are 10 more than anyone else on the team. In big moments, head coach Jon Scheyer wants his superstar holding the ball, and that will win out over the whole season.
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Arizona entered Friday’s game with a staggering 154-81 advantage on the glass through three games, but who better to counter that strength than a team than the Blue Devils? Scheyer never played anyone shorter than 6-foot-5, and Duke’s size advantage resulted in a 43-30 victory on the boards.
Flagg, Khaman Maluach, and Maliq Brown pulled down 16 between them, but Duke’s size in the backcourt deserves more attention. Knueppel finished with seven rebounds, Tulane transfer Sion James had six, and returning starters Caleb Foster and Tyrese Proctor both ended up with four. That’s a testament to their physicality and effort compared to other guards, and it’ll turn losses into wins later this year.
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Duke scored 35 points in the second half thanks to 16 from Flagg, 11 from Knueppel, and eight from Foster. I’ll save you the mental math, that’s literally all 35 of the team’s points.
The fact that Flagg was the only player to make a basket in the final 10 minutes against Kentucky was the biggest contribution to that loss, and those questions weren’t answered on Friday. It seems crazy to say considering that Scheyer spent all offseason saying he wouldn’t be able to play everyone he wanted to, but there aren’t enough reliable options in high-pressure situations. The remaining names are mostly freshmen, so perhaps that changes by January or February, but it’s an ominous trend.
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The Blue Devils led Kentucky by nine points at halftime last week, and Duke built a seven-point advantage at the midway point on Friday. The biggest difference in Tucson? The Blue Devils never let big plays turn into runs. The Wildcats make several efforts to turn the emotional tide early in the second half, most notably when Love and Carter Bryant made back-to-back threes to pull within seven with 10 minutes left. Flagg answered both shots with buckets of his own to keep Arizona at arm’s length, and he made his own 3-pointer two minutes later to move back ahead by eight.
Those are the tiny moments that get taken for granted in comfortable wins, but they snowball into devastation in comeback losses. They deserve mention.
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Knueppel averaged 15.0 points per game against Maine, Army, and Wofford, but he finished 5/20 from the field against Kentucky with one 3-pointer in eight attempts. Through the first half against Arizona, he only managed two points while making one of four shots. All of a sudden, just two weeks after he looked like the best scorer on the team, questions started to arise about Knueppel’s offensive reliability.
Well, Knueppel probably kept some angry social media posts in the drafts over the last 20 minutes. He scored 11 points thanks to a trio of 3-pointers down the line, including a long triple with 3:56 on the clock to make it a 12-point game. In just a few minutes, he went from a freshman who needed to be reexamined to all systems normal, and that’s a very positive development.
