Are you still buzzing after last night’s win over Florida? It’s happening across Duke Nation after one of the most exciting games in recent Cameron history. And let’s give Florida props: that’s a really good team. Thomas Haugh looks like an absolute pro. Interesting significa here: Haugh is 22, four years older than Cooper Flagg. He most likely won’t be a Gator after this year, and certainly not if he keeps playing like he did Monday night. The guy was sensational. This is pretty cool: though he grew up in Pennsylvania, Haugh always saw Florida as his dream school. It’s nice when you see guys make a childhood ideal come true. Apparently he got fixated on former Florida QB Tim Tebow and Florida was it after that. He was also high school teammates with Princeton transfer Xavian Lee. Lee and Boogie Fland are potentially a nice backcourt. Fland was a little erratic Tuesday, but he was pretty clutch down the stretch, and you can see that he’s getting more comfortable with his new team. Lee is clearly athletic and quick, but statistically he wasn’t a factor, shooting 1-10 and passing out just a single assist. Florida had issues inside too. Alex Condon is established and had NBA interest. He didn’t shoot that well in Durham, shooting just 4-11 for 11 points. Reuben Chinyelu wasn’t much of a factor on offense either, but he was a vacuum cleaner on the boards with 14 and Condon had 10. Yet despite that massive front line, which we thought would give Duke more problems, Duke did fairly well. At one point in the first half, the Blue Devils built a 15-point lead. They didn’t keep it, but they had it and in the end, Florida’s bigs didn’t defend Duke all that well. Duke’s big – Cameron Boozer, Patrick Ngongba and Maliq Brown – combined to hit 17-31 and scored 46 points. And despite poor shooting night from behind the line (7-26 for 27%), Duke outshot the Gators, hitting 45% overall. Florida hit just 7-28 (25%) on threes and 25-67 (37%) overall. Here’s the most striking stat to us: Florida had just 4 assists. This is not a selfish team, so that is down to Duke’s defense, which was very good. After the game, we were impressed to see that the Blue Devils had 11 blocks. One was by Brown, 5 were by Ngongba and 5 were by…Isaiah Evans?That’s an astonishing thing for a 6-6 guard whose calling card is the three. Last year, if he had missed 7 threes, he would have been pulled because his defense was not very good. This year, his defense keeps him in when he’s not shooting well. Keep this in mind too: Nik Khamenia moved into the starting lineup but was injured about 5 minutes in. He did come back, but was likely limited by his ankle. Duke got no points from Khamenia or Dame Sarr, though they did pull down 4 rebounds and Sarr got 2 steals. In the end, although Boozer gave what we’ve usually come to expect from him offensively, this game was about defense. After Evans hit his only three of the game on an absolute clutch shot, Boozer and Caleb Foster pressured Fland into a turnover and Fland put Foster on the line with :01 left. Foster missed, which was not ideal, but winning with :01 left and moving the ball to the other end of the court and getting a shot off would not be easy. And as it turned out, Brown put a cap on the whole game by getting his hands on Haugh’s inbounds pass. Back to Evans’ clutch shot for a minute. Florida double-teamed Boozer on that play, and Boozer made the right play. His scoring understandably get a lot of attention, and his grasp of the fundamentals should, but right alongside those factors, the guy has a desire to win that’s pretty unbelievable. He naturally gets compared to Cooper Flagg a lot and Flagg is a great player and he’s growing by leaps and bounds in the NBA. At Duke though, he struggled in winning time. He wasn’t ready to step up . At this stage, Boozer is ahead of Flagg in that area (stray thought: Flagg should be a freshman this year. The mind boggles at the thought of those two on the same team).After the game, Golden complained about the flagrant called on Brown, but Duke could just as easily have complained about Haugh elbowing Ngongba in the throat. Still, the argument about home cooking deserves some discussion.Golden said this afterwards: “I told our guys, to win in a place like Cameron, you’ve got to outplay Duke by 10 points because you’re not going to get any 50-50 calls. Things aren’t going to go your way, and we certainly had a little bit of that tonight. Again, overall, I thought we played a good game.”This is a consistent complaint across the years by many coaches, including Brad Brownell, who made similar comments when Jared McCain made three late steals to prevent a Clemson comeback a couple of years ago. Is it fair? Well, ask yourself this: do you think that the referees intentionally give Duke breaks in Cameron? Why would they?That would destroy their professional reputation and thus, their officiating careers. What probably is true is that in places like Cameron, Allen Field House or Rupp Arena, the crowd psychology affects everyone, including referees. There are times when calls are missed against an opposing team and the entire gym sees it and responds. You could be the toughest, thickest-skinned ref and you have thousands of people telling you that you blew it, it could affect you. It’s human nature. That’s almost certainly true. For it not to be true, you’d have to place officials outside of human nature and as tempting as that is, let’s not go there. Aside from that, no official told Florida to leave Evans open with a one-point lead. No official told Fland to lose control of the ball with a chance to win the game and no official told Haugh to put the ball where Brown could get to it. Golden is sort of right that you need to outplay a Duke, a Kansas or a Kentucky at home significantly to win, but they had two chances to preserve an impressive win, possibly three, and couldn’t do it. That’s entirely on Florida. That said, we admire that team. It showed a lot of heart and effort. They have a bit of an issue at point guard where Lee is probably not what they expected, at least so far, and we were surprised they only went seven deep, with the bench guys contributing just 6 points, 3 rebounds, 2 assists and 2 steals. We thought they were deeper than that. Micah Handlogten got 14 minutes and Urban Klavzar, who looks like he could be a real pain in the ass, got 26. He’s quick, he’s smart and on other nights, he’ll be a major factor. It was a big road game so the rotation understandably tightened and there is stuff we’re not aware of behind the scenes. Still, Florida could have used more from their bench. Boozer may be the most fundamentally sound freshman Duke has had since…Shane Battier? DeMatha legend Morgan Wooten would have loved that guy. He rarely makes a mistake on his fundamentals. When he gets the ball inside, he never brings it down. When he rebounds, he puts two hands on the ball, and his outlet passes are flawless. That said, when Klavzar swiped the ball from a much stronger Boozer midcourt with…it wasn’t really a mistake on fundamentals, but Boozer is 6-9 and 250 while Klavzar is 6-1 and 195. It was a really alert play by Klavzar, but less so on Boozer’s part. We’re sure they’ll discuss that, along with Cayden’s foolish turnover near half-court where he allowed himself to essentially get trapped at the half court line, in the middle of the court. Not sure we’ve ever seen that before. In short, there were deficiencies in various spots and at times, Duke faltered a bit. What we saw from the Blue Devils overall though was a kind of fire that you don’t see every day from any team. It wasn’t there every minute of the game and Duke absolutely gave the Gators a chance to get back into it. But this team has a spine. Which is good, because they’ll need it in the Breslin Center when they play Michigan State Saturday, and they’ll most likely need more from Khamenia and Sarr to win that one on the road. Go to the DBR Boards to find Blue Healer Auctions |
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