Duke has the talent to make the Final Four. In fact, the Blue Devils have a team that could make noise when it gets there.
With two All-ACC team members and one of the best freshmen in the country, as well as the emergence of sophomore Mark Mitchell as a reliable scoring option, there aren’t many teams with Duke’s top-five talent.
The Blue Devils need to get to the Final Four for that to matter, however. That requires them to win four straight games, and with each passing game in spring, that looks less and less likely.
After Thursday’s loss to NC State in the ACC Tournament, Duke has played 12 games since the beginning of February. The Blue Devils have shot below 32% from behind the 3-point line in six of those games. They’ve turned the ball over at least 10 times in six of those games. They’ve shot 70% or worse from the free-throw line in six of those games.
Even their esteemed five starters can’t all get on the same page. Against North Carolina in Chapel Hill in February, sophomore Tyrese Proctor went 1/6 from the floor and had more personal fouls than points. In the next game against Notre Dame, senior captain Jeremy Roach went 3/10 from the floor to score seven points and the team shot 22.2% from long range.
Freshman Jared McCain went 1/8 from three in the following game against Boston College. Then Proctor went 0/5 at home against Wake Forest, and then Mitchell, Filipowski, and Caleb Foster combined to shoot 8/21 from the floor against Florida State, and you get the idea.
The issues all culminated against the Wolfpack when Proctor, McCain, and Roach teamed to shoot 7/28 from the floor and 3/14 from beyond the 3-point line. With Foster battling an ankle injury and unlikely to come back anytime soon, Duke doesn’t have the backcourt depth to spell more than one of them at a time.
The end result? The trio combined for 23 points on 28 shots and Duke lost by five.
The Blue Devils, by every advanced metric, have been one of the best offenses in the country all season. As a team, they average 79.8 points per game, and KenPom grades them as the eighth-best offense in the country in adjusted points per possession.
However, it’s felt like a sure thing that at least one member of the team won’t show up any given night. When the lights get brighter and every team ahead of them is a top-30 team in the country, Duke can’t afford a random member of its starting five to shoot 20% from the floor, especially with their limited depth.
Can they rely on all five members to show up night-in and night-out?