After a torrid start from 3-point range, the Blue Devils have made fewer than 33% of their triples in three of their last four games.
The Duke Blue Devils have won their past four games for an 8-2 start to the 2024-25 men’s basketball season, but if any Cameron Crazies have sensed something wrong about [autotag]Cooper Flagg[/autotag] and his teammates on the offensive end, there’s an easy culprit on the stat sheet.
The Blue Devils started the season with at least 96 in each of their first two games, but they’ve only surpassed 76 points twice in the last eight. While four top-25 opponents and the conference opener might be responsible for a large chunk of that regression, a reliable part of the offense has abandoned this Duke team: the 3-point shot.
Through the first six games of the season, Duke knocked down 37.7% of its 3-point shots even with a dismal 4/24 showing against the Kentucky Wildcats. The Blue Devils finished each of the other five games in that sample with at least a 36% clip, including three games north of 40%, and that stretch included a road game at Arizona and a neutral-site game against Kansas.
In the four games since? That percentage has dropped to 31.0% despite a 9/22 night against the Auburn Tigers, and if five-star freshman Isaiah Evans gets removed from the data, it plummets to 25.6%.
Of course, it’s silly to pretend Evans hasn’t been a bright spot. The North Carolina native knocked down six first-half threes against the Tigers to pull Duke back ahead, and he made four more in the second half against Incarnate Word on Tuesday night. He’s averaged 8.7 points in 12.9 minutes per game this season, and he’s made exactly half of his shots from behind the arc despite averaging five attempts per night.
But it’s reasonable to question whether the other sharpshooters on the roster might cost Duke a game in the near future. Flagg was never pitched as a marksman, but it still counts when he shoots, and he’s 1/12 (8.3%) since the Seattle game began. Sophomore Caleb Foster and Purdue transfer Mason Gillis, two 40% shooters in 2023-24, have combined to go 5/19 (26.3%) in that four-game stretch, and freshman scorer Kon Knueppel is 4/14 (28.6%) over the last three.
Perhaps there’s some deeper pyschological or fundemantal reason for the sudden regression, but to the untrained eye, it seems like the Blue Devils have taken the right shots. They’ve been disciplined with their ball movement, players take advantage of off-ball designs and screens, and they look decisive when they finally get a window. And yet the ball won’t find the basket.
It’s never the popular answer, especially this early in the season, but the most likely explanation is that this is a fluky four-game run for a team with exceptional shooting talent. It’s worth monitoring against George Mason next Tuesday, however, and if the issue persists much longer than that, it’ll be hard to keep the alarm bells quiet.
