It’s a well-documented fact that games in November really do impact what happens in March. But for a young team like Duke, the early portion of the schedule is even more important because of the learning opportunities they present.
That’s why the challenging four-game stretch that begins on Saturday with a rare non-conference road game against No. 17 Arizona will tell a lot about who these Blue Devils are and how good they have the potential to be. Before returning home from the Desert Southwest, they’ll also take on top-ranked Kansas in Las Vegas next Wednesday. Then, after catching their breath against Seattle, Duke will take on No. 4 Auburn at Cameron Indoor Stadium as part of the ACC/SEC Challenge.
“To get this test on the road this early, it’s an incredible opportunity for us,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “I know for our team, how much we learned from the Kentucky game. We’re going to learn so much on this trip. It’s exciting to think about.”
Even in defeat, the 12th-ranked Blue Devils’ loss to Kentucky at the Champions Classic last week was beneficial. Within the span of that 40 minutes in Atlanta, Jon Scheyer’s team showed just how good it can be during a first half that saw it build a 9-point lead and just how far it still has left to grow once the Wildcats began putting the heat on them down the stretch.
That was especially the case with freshman stars Cooper Flagg and Kon Knueppel. Flagg looked every bit the part of the projected top pick in next year’s NBA Draft with a dominant 26-point, 11-rebound, 2-block performance through the first 39 minutes. But with the ball and the game in his hands on the final two possessions, he turned it over twice, dooming his team to a 77-72 loss.
His classmate Knueppel had an even tougher time. After lighting it up from distance against two lesser opponents, the sharpshooter went 1-for-8 from 3-point range against the quicker, more physical Kentucky defense. Despite those hiccups and the second-half collapse that contributed to the result, Scheyer came away encouraged by his team’s performance.
“They played hard,” he said. “We’ve got a long season to go. I feel more optimistic about tonight, losing, than I did before because you find out in this game the character of your team, the heart they have. And this team has got a lot of heart.”
Over the next two weeks, that heart will be put to the test. Regardless of what happens, the Blue Devils should emerge older, wiser and harder to beat. That’s the hope, anyway.
RJ Davis’ shooting slump is familiar to Hubert Davis
This isn’t exactly what RJ Davis envisioned when he decided to return for a fifth season at North Carolina.
The 2024 ACC Player of the Year is still scoring. He’s averaging 17.7 points through his first three games. But he’s shooting only 31.9% from the floor, 11 percent lower than a year ago. And he’s made only 5 of his 25 3-point attempts.
It’s a cold snap that has raised concern among Tar Heels fans.
But not coach Hubert Davis.
“One of the things I tell the guys all the time is that there are going to be times when the shots go in and there’s times that they don’t,” Davis said after a recent win against American University in which his star guard went 1-of-5 from beyond the arc. “RJ is a great basketball player, but he can also really shoot. Those percentages are going to even out. There’s going to be times when he’ll close his eyes and just throw the ball up and it’s going to go in.”
Davis the coach had a one-on-one meeting with Davis the player last week to reinforce that point to his not-so-sharp sharpshooter.
It turned out to be a history lesson more than a pep talk.
Hubert Davis went through a similar early-season slump at the start of his final season with the Tar Heels.
Feeling left behind after his friends and former teammates King Rice, Rick Fox and Pete Chilcutt graduated and moved on, it took the star shooting guard a few games to blend in with a new group of players.
“The rhythm was just a little off,” Hubert Davis said. “Where were my boys? I would get the ball, but I would get it at a different spot, and it really took me a little bit of time my senior to find that rhythm. Once I did, I was ready to go.
“I feel the same way with RJ. When I told him that story, I could see his face light up. He went, ‘yeah, that’s kind of how I feel.’”
The only way for a shooter to break out of a shooting slump is to keep shooting. And that’s what Hubert Davis advised RJ Davis to do.
In the meantime, he offered a few suggestions, based on his own experience, on what his star can do until the ball starts going through the hoop.
“I would lose myself in other things,” he said. “I would get extra rebounds, extra assists, get loose balls, be even better on the defensive end and not think about ‘Oh my gosh, here comes my shot. I’ve got to make it.’ I’d take my mind off it. I was just confident enough that if I took good shots they’d eventually go in.”
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- With both Duke and North Carolina encountering early stumbles, albeit against elite competition, the most impressive ACC team thus far has been Pittsburgh. Jeff Capel’s team barely missed out on the NCAA Tournament a year ago and lost Bub Carrington to the first round of the NBA Draft. But with sophomore Ishmael Leggett and a vastly improved Guillermo Diaz Graham leading the way, the Panthers are off to a 5-0 start. Although they still aren’t ranked in either the AP top 25 or the coaches poll, their 24-point rout of West Virginia bumped them up to No. 15 in KenPom’s rankings. We’ll get a better read on how good Pitt really is over the next 5 games, all of which are against power conference opponents. Starting with Friday’s clash with LSU.
- When NC State coach Kevin Keatts said his team would make up for the loss of leading scorers DJ Horne and DJ Burns “by committee,” he wasn’t kidding. The Wolfpack has already had four different players either lead the team or tie for the team lead in scoring in its first four games, all wins. Senior guard Breon Pass and Bowling Green transfer Marcus Hill shared top honors in State’s opener against USC Update. Jayden Taylor led against both Presbyterian and Coastal Carolina while big man Ben Middlebrooks came off the bench to pace the scoring against Colgate. The only player to score double figures in every game, Louisville transfer Brandon Huntley-Hatfield, has yet to lead the team. As balanced and versatile as this NC State team already is, it will soon get even deeper and potentially more explosive when another former Cardinal, guard Mike James, is fully recovered from minor knee surgery.
- Wake Forest has three returning starters and Steve Forbes’ usual complement of top transfers. The Deacons already have the kind of signature nonconference win against Michigan that they’ve lacked in previous seasons. And yet, something is still off. Especially on the offensive end of the floor. The dysfunction caught up to them in the Skip Prosser Classic at Xavier when they committed 18 turnovers in a 75-60 loss. It’s a problem Forbes said is easily correctable once the schedule allows them to work on it. “One challenge early in the season is that we’ve played six games but only had seven practices,” the Wake coach said. “It’s a bit crazy. We need more practice time to address these areas and work on things.”
- Thanks to the combination of something old and something new, Stanford has been an early surprise in its first ACC season. The old is 7-foot-1 senior Maxime Raynaud, who entered the transfer portal after Jerod Haase was fired last spring but chose to stay in Palo Alto after the hiring of new coach Kyle Smith from Washington State. The decision has worked out well so far. Raynaud ranks second in the ACC in scoring at 21.3 ppg and leads the league in rebounding at 12.8. He posted his fourth straight double-double with a career-high 33 points and 14 rebounds in last Sunday’s win against UC Davis. His play has been a key element in Stanford’s 5-0 start under Smith, the 2024 Pac-12 Coach of the Year. With upcoming games against Santa Clara, Grand Canyon, Cal Poly and Utah Valley, it’s conceivable that the Cardinal could be 9-0 before facing its first real test in its ACC opener against rival Cal on Dec. 7.
