[autotag]Cooper Flagg[/autotag] and the Duke Blue Devils ended the calendar year with yet another convincing victory, scoring 51 second-half points against Virginia Tech for an 88-65 win to round out a perfect December.
For the first 10 minutes, it looked like the Blue Devils would be dragged into another bare-knuckle brawl in Durham. Duke failed to crack 30 points in each of its last two opening halves at Cameron Indoor Stadium, waiting until the second half to pull away from Incarnate Word and George Mason, and a two-for-nine start from the floor invoked some déjà vu from the home crowd.
Kon Knueppel and Tyrese Proctor found early windows from behind the 3-point line, but as the Duke offense did for most of the month, good looks found iron instead of net to keep points off the board. From the corner, the top of the key, anywhere the Blue Devils found room, they still missed on 10 of their first 11 3-point looks.
Instead of letting the Hokies hang around, however, Flagg did what generational prospects do: he enforced his will. The 6-foot-9 freshman finally took the lid off the bucket from 3-point range with a knockdown triple at the 13:26 mark of the first, his fifth conversion on his previous 22 3-point attempts.
The three put the finishing touches on Duke’s first eight points of the game, all coming from the first-year star. After a four-minute stint on the bench, he let another 3-pointer fly from the top of the key despite some contact. The ball found nylon as Flagg fell to the court, a four-point play to give him 12 for the evening already. Another mid-range jumper thirty seconds later, 14 points with seven minutes left until the break.
Those two buckets kickstarted the Blue Devils’ offense once and for all, giving them a 19-16 lead that the home team never surrendered again the rest of the game. After two Proctor free throws, Knueppel, Isaiah Evans, and Purdue transfer Mason Gillis drained a trio of threes one after the other for a 17-2 run.
In four minutes, Virginia Tech went from leading by two to trailing by 13, and another early scare evaporated under the fluorescent lighting.
In his second game as an 18-year-old, Flagg looked like the complete scorer Duke wants him to blossom into before March. The 3-pointers obviously add a nightmarish wrinkle for opposing defenses, but he whirled and carved his way through the Hokies toward the paint over and over again. His combination of size and speed sat on full display with a trio of layups in the first 10 minutes after halftime, and Virginia Tech looked helpless to keep him from the glass.
Flagg ended the afternoon with 24 points, his fourth 20-point outing in Duke’s past six games, along with six assists, four steals, and three rebounds. He made nine of his 14 shots from the floor, a noticeable jump from his 38.3% efficiency over the previous five games.
Five other Blue Devils reached double-digits for the game after strong second halves, and the team made six of its 10 3-pointers and 66.7% (18/27) of its overall shots over the final 20 minutes.
Duke’s first game of 2025 will come on Saturday against the SMU Mustangs out in Texas.