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No. 2 Duke shakes off sluggish performance for unsatisfying win
DURHAM, N.C. -- For No. 2 Duke (9-0), just like for No. 1 Kentucky and all of the top teams in college basketball, its opponent is a pretty formidable one, and especially this time of year.
It's themselves.
Even Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski, whose military background has always seeped down to his team in terms of their discipline and grit, has to fight it.
Duke's last game was December 3, when they knocked off a top-5 Wisconsin team on the road. The Blue Devils looked nothing like that team for most of the night against Elon (5-5), slogging their way through a listless 75-62 win.
You don't get listless from Duke very often. And it's clear Krzyzewski -- who spent most of the night angrily imploring his team to give him more -- doesn't like seeing it.
"We didn't do hard things tonight. That comes from layoff, them playing hard, people telling us how good we are and ... we've got a long way to go," Krzyzewski said. "Hard things would be finishes. Hard things would be strong with the ball. Hard things would be to talk. Hard things would be to dive for loose balls. We didn't do those things, which is what we'd been doing. As a result, we have a real scattered performance.
"That's what happens after exams, after a layoff, and after you've played a great game, because you're normal. And in order to be really good, you can't be normal. Normal stays in the past and wants it easier after some great accomplishment. When you're not normal, you get hungrier. We weren't able to pass that test tonight ... human nature beat the hell out of us tonight."
To say Duke is justifiably disappointed with a 13-point win in a game it controlled throughout seems ridiculous. But that's where Duke is right now.
With this group of freshmen that has played with other-worldly poise combined with unselfish upperclassmen who have accepted their various roles, it's been a magical mixture through the early part of the season.
It wasn't magical against Elon at all, as the Blue Devils shot well from the field (51.8 percent) but just 18.8 percent from three and a very uncharacteristic 51.9 percent from the foul line, adding 17 turnovers to boot.
It wasn't a simple as the statistics, either. As Krzyzewski said, Duke didn't want to do the difficult things. They didn't finish strong -- in the game itself (Elon "won" the second half 41-39) or around the basket. They had sloppy turnovers, silly fouls and didn't follow the defensive gameplan in the early going.
"I'm not sure what it's from, but I think that we were all kind of mentally weak. We just weren't there today," Duke freshman Jahlil Okafor said. "There's a lot of mental mistakes that we made today."
Okafor finished with 25 points on 10-of-14 shooting and 20 rebounds, a freshman record at Duke. His teammates without him shot just 19-of-42 from the floor, and they went to the 6-foot-9 freshman whenever they needed a bucket. More often than not, he obliged.
But Okafor wasn't all that happy afterwards, he said, because the team wasn't happy about the way it had performed in general. "No I'm not. Just the feeling in the locker room right now, even though we won, we're all not happy with the way we performed. We did win, and I'm happy about that," Okafor said. "And it is my (19th) birthday," he added slyly, allowing himself to smile.
Smiles weren't very common in the Duke postgame locker room.
After last season, Krzyzewski said he felt like he made some mistakes coaching that team. Maybe he let things get a little too sloppy before they got fixed, or maybe the team's habits slipped too far before he could get them back.
Maybe this team is just a heck of a lot better than that one.
Either way you look at it, it's not acceptable to Krzyzewski. Without Okafor, his team would have lost. That was hardly a comforting thought and did nothing to soften the blow.
"That doesn't soften up anything," Krzyzewski said. "In fact, it makes it worse because he covered up for a lot. It's like sweeping dirt under the rug, man. The dirt's still there. He was a big rug, but you're still sweeping dirt on that thing."
The 20 rebounds for Okafor, Krzyzewski said, were mostly attributable to -- well, to Okafor being really good, of course, but also to Elon going to a 1-3-1 zone where they couldn't rebound as well. Okafor had 10 offensive rebounds and 10 defensive boards, and plenty of the offensive boards were after Duke's missed jump shots.
But even he wasn't perfect.
"He's got to hit his free throws, because people are going to foul him. In a game like tonight, probably he gets two-thirds of the times he was fouled, which is great. I wish that happened every game. So then you have to punish people," Krzyzewski said.
If you think he's being too tough on his star freshman, well, he's not.
"This is the worst we've felt all year after a win. I think this is the one game where we weren't happy with our performance," Okafor said.
Krzyzewski spoke frequently about his team being young. Yes, there are four freshmen. But he meant the way that his team played on this night, and the general inconsistency.
Even Duke's upperclassmen are victims of it, and have shown tendencies to do it.
"We're definitely excited that we got the win because we beat a very good team, but we're not excited with our overall performance. We feel like we could've played much better," senior and captain Amile Jefferson said afterward.
"I guess that's why guys are a little bit down. Shots didn't fall as much as we wanted. But we stuck it out and we fought, and we beat a really good team tonight. For our group, it's about coming back tomorrow and being ready to practice really hard and grow up. Really, that's what it's about for our team -- being mature day in and day out, playing hard for 40 minutes."
That consistency is key in Duke's maturity going forward.
When asked about his team getting "back on track", he scoffed at the notion that they were on a track to begin with through just nine games.
"I don't know. I mean, get back on track? We've only played nine games. I don't know what track is. We haven't played long enough to have a track," Krzyzewski said. "We beat Wisconsin once. We beat Stanford. We beat Michigan State. But that doesn't -- you've got to do this over and over again against really good teams. We're not ready to do that yet. We've got to get ready to do that."
Duke is written about, as Krzyzewski says, in extremes. Which means that just as much as the Blue Devils were praised after their dismantling of Wisconsin, some -- not all, but some -- will nitpick them based on this performance.
He's used to it. His team isn't as much.
"We get written about in extremes. I'm accustomed to that. That's happened for at least 25 years," Krzyzewski said. "You're either great or what the hell's wrong because you've lost. They're not accustomed to that. They're not. For four of them, that's their ninth college game. So they now have played a great game and a not-so-great game their last two games. So I would say that's inconsistent. Part of being really good is to be consistent."
Demanding excellence early and often from this group on both ends of the court, though, is a sign that this team is everything -- or could be everything -- Krzyzewski could hope for, because he wouldn't do it if he didn't think they were capable of it.
"You've got to be tougher. We talk about it and talk about it. But we just weren't as good as we need to be, and as we're going to be, and as we have been," Krzyzewski said.
"We're not even close to who we can be. And that includes the Wisconsin game. I'm sure Bo Ryan would say that Wisconsin wasn't great that night. Sometimes, you look better because someone else isn't as ready to play you. It's called dealing with reality. That's what we're going to deal with, with reality."
